Debates of June 3rd, 2025

Wildfires in Manitoba and Saskatchewan

[The Deputy Speaker, Tom Kmiec]

Before I allow the member for St. Albert—Sturgeon River to respond, I will say that I will not be responding. I know the hour is late, but I will remind members that questions and comments are to be made through the Chair.

The hon. member for St. Albert—Sturgeon River.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is very disappointing that the minister has decided to play politics with wildfires, but it is part of the pattern with the government to cite climate change as the basis for every wildfire. Yes, climate change is a factor, but there are many other factors, including the bad forest management policies of the government, as well as human activity, among other factors.

[Grant Jackson, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I will follow up on that line of commentary of my colleague from St. Albert—Sturgeon River. The Liberal government certainly has a record on ensuring that Canada faces these challenges. I wonder whether the member could respond to what exactly he thinks the Liberal Party's record is in ensuring that Canada is well prepared to respond to emergency events like natural disasters and wildfires.

Does the member believe that the Liberals have, over their 10 years in government, prepared this country well to respond to these types of events?

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the simple answer is no. Resources are lacking. Equipment is lacking. What we have seen with the government is that there are a lot of empty words. The Liberal Party across the way committed to a half-billion-dollar investment to recruit and train new firefighters and to acquire much-needed equipment, including helicopters and fire bombers, but three and a half years later, the government has failed to deliver, as wildfires have been raging out of control not just this year but also in other recent years.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to put on the record, of course, that forest management is exclusively a provincial jurisdiction, but there are many important climate factors, and some that are not exclusively climate. Somebody will point out that, yes, a fire gets started by lightning, but what if there is a fuel load that is absolutely tinder dry from years of hot, dry climate events that make it so likely that fires have changed their behaviour because of the climate crisis?

I wonder whether my hon. colleague has any comments on the provincial role.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I would note, since the member was to some degree alluding to climate change, that a recent IPCC climate report assigned only medium confidence to the idea that climate change has increased fire weather in some parts of the earth.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am deeply concerned. It is June 3, and we have never seen raging wildfires this early in June, especially in the Prairies. I think about my Uncle Keith, who has respiratory illness and lives in Manitoba. The fires are a challenge to people's health, not just the evacuees but people right across the Prairies.

I am more concerned about the urgency and about getting organized. We know there are over 100,000 volunteer firefighters in local departments across the country, some of whom could be deployed to help in wildfire season, especially now, but there is still no national fire administration to help coordinate this, something the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs has requested for a long time. We are the only G7 country without one.

Does my colleague agree that it is time the federal government established a national fire administration to coordinate things, especially this fire season?

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

Mr. Speaker, there is more work for the federal government to do with respect to coordination and firefighter recruitment and retention. There are measures the government could take by adopting the proposed bill put forward by the hon. member and recommended by the finance committee, and that is to expand the volunteer firefighter tax credit from $3,000 to $10,000. The Parliamentary Budget Officer—

[The Deputy Speaker, Tom Kmiec]

I have to interrupt the member as his time has expired.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Calgary Confederation.

[Corey Hogan, Liberal, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.

My heart goes out to people in the west dealing with wildfires and displacement. While this is a debate rightly focused on wildfires in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, like other members, I did want to acknowledge that wildfires are also impacting the people of Alberta, with thousands of evacuees from Swan Hills, Dene Tha' and other communities across the province.

We have seen many wildfires of late in my home province of Alberta alone: in Slave Lake and Richardson in 2011, Fort McMurray in May 2016, High Level in 2019 and millions of hectares in 2023 that forced thousands of evacuations. Of course, last year in Jasper, 25,000 people were evacuated and hundreds of homes were destroyed. Sadly, that is a pretty incomplete list of all of the fires.

We know wildfire seasons are getting longer, more intense and harder to predict across the nation, and more extreme weather, like wildfires and floods, are now our reality. It is tragic. We need to live the mantra of prepare, adapt and recover. We need to do what we can, as a government, as a Parliament and as a nation, to assist the affected people across the west through this troubling time.

These events are concentrated moments in a chain of events. Looking backwards, leading to this are decisions we have made as societies across the globe that have increased extreme weather events. We cannot wave away climate change. It is not a future threat; it is a present one. It takes a somewhat wilful blindness to ignore the increasing frequency of so-called 100-year floods and once-in-a-generation forest fires. It takes a denial that borders on malice to ignore the increase in hurricanes, droughts and heat waves that climate change has brought, which have cost the lives of thousands across the globe.

If members are not familiar with what a wet-bulb temperature is, I am sorry to say they likely will be in the future. It is a temperature and humidity at which sweating no longer cools people down. When that temperature is over 35 degrees for long enough, death without air conditioning is a given. Climate change is driving wet-bulb temperatures to be more frequent and of longer duration. It is, one might say, a five-alarm wake-up call.

We need to prepare, adapt and recover. The changes to our climate brought on by climate change are already here. We need to prepare for more extreme weather events, adapt to our changing climate and recover when the events happen. We do need to be fire smart, which includes ignition-resistant homes, firebreaks and land use planning, keeping yards clean and forest management. Prescribed burns are done by the provinces, and Parks Canada does some, but we have to acknowledge it is a smaller window for prescribed burns, and there is resource competition with all of the wildfires that are occurring because of climate change.

Yes, I agree with members opposite that a national firefighting force has promise, and I am glad it is something being explored. I am glad that, as the Minister of Emergency Management and Community Resilience has said, nothing is off the table. We also need to incentivize residents and businesses to prepare for and adapt to this changing climate. We need to minimize the damage. We need to take steps now, working with global partners, to reduce the damage that climate change is bringing us.

My friends, this is not as bad as it gets. I said fires are part of a chain. We have looked backwards, but now it is time to look forward from this event. These crises are often less time-bound and geography-bound than we imagine.

In a past life, I worked for the Government of Alberta, in a province that has seen too many major wildfires. I joined just after Fort McMurray was evacuated and burned, as it was being rebuilt. I was there in 2019 when wildfires forced the evacuation of High Level. Unfortunately, one of the things we learned is that the effects of wildfires last far longer than the moment of crisis. There is an event, a fire; people are evacuated and the community is with them. The country is with them. Volunteers and donations come in from everywhere, from across the globe.

A year later, life is supposed to be normal again. The fire is gone; people are back. Maybe their homes are rebuilt. That is often when mental health problems begin. By then, that national and international focus and that national and international support are gone. As the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands said, it is a long, hard road to recovery.

The events are also less geography-bound, and the hazy skies over Ottawa today remind us of that. Calgarians know this very well. From 1981 to 2015, there were an average of 18 smoke hours per year in the city of Calgary. No year had over 100. Now we see hundreds of smoke hours routinely: 315 in 2017, 450 in 2018, 439 in 2021, 512 in 2023, and 2024 was only 200. Again, I will say that is compared to a 1981-to-2015 average that was far lower.

Such smoke presents serious risks. The concentrated air pollution that forest fires create can, on the mild end, cause headaches and coughs and inconvenience for the healthy. On the more serious end, it moves from asthma attacks and irregular heartbeats to heart attacks, strokes and birth defects.

Again, as we look to the effects across geography and time, we must prepare, adapt and recover. We need air filtration, both home and personal, for communities far from hot spots; mental health supports for the affected; and insurance, longer-term funding and support to rebuild when we lose communities and homes, as we tragically have and tragically will.

I want to close by saying that none of this can be done at the expense of responding to the moment of crisis we find ourselves in. For those affected, their governments, communities and first responders are with them. We will move heaven and earth to respond to this moment. Not all will be perfect, as nothing is in these moments, but these are the moments when we set aside all partisan thought and have no thought but for their safety. However, I ask that as this moment of crisis recedes, the House not lose sight of the chain, forward and backward, that it is part of: the imperative to address climate change, the imperative to think broadly about this challenge and the imperative to be there for people when the news cycle moves on.

My children have had too many smoke-filled days. Our country has seen too many evacuees flee their homes, unsure if they will ever return. Communities have seen too many lives unravelled by the long-term consequences. We have in our hands, as a Parliament, the power and responsibility to help our country prepare, adapt and recover. I hope we take that responsibility very seriously.

[Laila Goodridge, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for his speech. As a fellow Albertan, it is sometimes wonderful to hear some of those thoughts, processes and pieces. He highlighted the Fort McMurray fire, how he came into the office of the NDP premier of Alberta shortly thereafter and that many failings happened, in large part because there was not as much communication happening among the different levels of government. Coordination was missed. There were 80,000 people being evacuated. I think sometimes it is really easy to look at things in isolation and play on those pieces.

Since that time, we have learned a lot of things. One thing that is really frustrating to me as someone who has experienced wildfires since she was a kid, as I have lived in Fort McMurray my entire life, is that these are not new, but we are not building resiliency. What is his government going to do to build resiliency into communities so they do not have to evacuate and have fire protections in place?

[Corey Hogan, Liberal, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to clear up an inaccuracy. I did not work for the NDP government. I was a public servant in Alberta. I worked for Premier Notley and Premier Kenney for an equal number of budgets, as I like to put it. I was there for two budgets for each of them.

As for what the government can do to make us more fire smart and make sure that people do not need to evacuate their homes, that gets down to good fire management. That means keeping yards clean in fire risk areas. That means making sure there are appropriate firebreaks. That will make sure that people know exactly what they need to do and the risks they might be introducing into their lives if they do not follow some of that.

There is much that can be done. There are much better experts to talk about the finer points than me on that. What is most important is that we, as a Parliament, work together on this to give a consistent message about safety and how we can increase safety from coast to coast to coast.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I found it very interesting that my colleague pointed out the significant impact climate change has on mental health in the aftermath of these forest fires.

I would like to ask my colleague if he could elaborate on his thoughts and tell us what options Canadians have when considering climate change-related issues. These certainly cause anxiety, but it seems to me that some people may also feel paralyzed. I would like to hear his thoughts on that.

[Corey Hogan, Liberal, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I agree. We have a choice between acting and being paralyzed, and, unfortunately, being paralyzed is moving backward as the climate moves on, whether or not we care to admit it. The good news is that as Canadians, we have the power in our hands to start making positive change in this world on this very topic.

We have the ingenuity, we have the expertise, and we have the commitment to create a better world that is so fundamental to Canadian-ness. I would encourage all Canadians to not think about this in a way that is either dispassionate or feeling as though they are overwhelmed by it, but to think that the tools exist, and we have it within our hands to solve this and be legends.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, one of the things we know is that these kinds of wildfires and climate emergencies are happening more and more. One of the things we do rely on is the military to come and assist. They have done a tremendous job in the past, and they continue to do so. However, what happens is that they often lack the resources necessary, the equipment, to face up to and assist in these types of natural disasters and climate emergencies.

Would the member actually support allocating dollars to the military, so they can beef up their ability to respond to natural disasters, especially in light of the fact that the Prime Minister has made a commitment to expand military spending to 2%?

[Corey Hogan, Liberal, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I personally support greatly increased military spending. I think it is part of an overall plan to strengthen Canada that includes a stronger economy, a stronger military and stronger cultural institutions.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I particularly want to thank my new colleague from Calgary Confederation for a quite excellent speech.

This debate has been going on now since 6:30 this evening. It is now, as we can see by the clock, 11:40 p.m. I am disappointed that we have not been able to make more progress on finding common ground. There is no question but that every single member of the House is thinking of and concerned for the communities most at risk, where people are scrambling for their life, leaving their home behind and maybe leaving pets behind. Everyone is wondering, with their heart in their throat, whether they will see their home again.

The focus of this night's emergency debate, inspired by the motion and the letter to the Speaker from the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre, is about the people and the communities right now that are running for their life. The focus was on Manitoba because it was the Premier of Manitoba who first called for a state of emergency in his province on May 28. The next day, May 29, the Premier of Saskatchewan, Scott Moe, called a state of emergency there. There was no intentionality to leave out the fact that Alberta has major wildfires right now across the province or that British Columbia has wildfires.

I am a British Columbia MP. My husband's family has a farm, but the farmhouse is now not used for people who want to do farming. Ever since the summer of 2021, that house has been providing refuge for people who have had to leave their home because of forest fires and because of floods. My husband's daughter nearly died in the heat dome because it hit 50°C in Ashcroft, British Columbia. My step-daughter, Julia, who is in her mid-thirties and healthy, nearly died.

With climate events that have hit us over and over again, one might think we would learn things from those emergencies. Despite the fact that I know that people have the goodwill to say we are learning, I think because of the nature of our being so segmented, so siloed between provinces, between territories, between municipalities and between first nations, governments tend to be way ahead of everyone else in realizing what needs to be done, but how do we marshal the resources? What do we actually do to confront the threat?

Earlier tonight, someone mentioned that this state of long seasons of wildfires that do not seem to end, that are more intense every year, is a new normal. It is not. We have entered a state of what John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather, calls “the Petrocene”. We have entered a time where everything is unknown; we do not know. What we can say is that this may be the hottest weather we have ever seen, and 2024 was the hottest year on record for the whole planet since records were kept. We might say this is the hottest summer we have seen in the last, my gosh, couple of hundred years. We can also equally say that this is the coolest summer we are going to get for the next couple of hundred years.

When we are focusing on forest fires and we are talking about what is happening right now, I want to split my time between saying what it is that we know about climate science and what we should be doing right now, because there has not been a whole lot of science talked about tonight, although some people have made a very good-faith effort.

Some members say with good intention that the forests had all the dead trees from the pine beetle outbreak. Right, that is called a positive feedback loop, because the pine beetle outbreak was caused by global warming. Ask our former right-wing British Columbia premier, Gordon Campbell, who figured out that usually the pine beetle is killed in a winter cold snap if the temperature gets to -35°C. That does it; that stops the pest that is endemic to our lodgepole pine forests.

Cutting to the chase here, we lost an area of interior British Columbia forest two times the size of Sweden because of global warming. It was the first major multi-billion-dollar impact from the climate crisis. That is why Gordon Campbell was the first premier in the province to bring in a carbon price. Those dead forests stood there, and with hotter and drier weather, the fuel load got hotter, drier and tinder-dry every year, it seems. Sometimes it is described as a very persistent drought. It is the beginning of what could be described as the pointy edge of desertification, because it is not likely to go away. We have fundamentally changed the climate. Atmospheric chemistry has changed.

We never had more than 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere over the last million years. Again, that is based on Antarctic ice core data. It is actual science. It is a number. It is empirical. Now it is 427 parts per million, and when it goes up, it does not go down. Our emissions have grown. We pledged to stop increasing our emissions back in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit, and still they have grown globally. Burning fossil fuels are the main reason that what was once a beneficial natural phenomenon called “the greenhouse effect” has been overheated and overcharged. The greenhouse effect made this planet alone, in this solar system, warm enough to sustain any life at all. However, we have saturated the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and we have overwhelmed the natural carbon sinks that pulled them out of the atmosphere.

That is what has happened to our forests. They were once carbon sinks; they held more carbon, and they sequestered carbon, but they ceased to be sinks. They are sources of forest disease and carbon from forest fires, which we do not count in our ledgers of where we are in fighting greenhouse gases and reducing emissions.

In terms of the science, the best book on this and one I recommend highly, is Fire Weather by John Vaillant, one of Canada's best writers, just in the way he can craft words with the language. He became fascinated with forest fires, and he was studying the Fort McMurray fire, the beast of 2016, and he got deeper and deeper into it. His conclusions are important. People say the boreal forest is a fire-driven ecosystem. Yes, there have always been fires in our boreal, but not these fires. These are what John Vaillant calls the “21st-century fire”. These are fires whose very behaviour has been changed by the climate crisis itself. They burn hotter, they move faster and they create their own weather conditions, high winds, unpredictable, the beast. They are different.

John Vaillant concludes, “We're changing the climate...in a way that favours fire way more than it favours us.” We have driven the climate to an overheated state that continues to cause more forest fires, and the fires behave differently. We do need solutions. Yes, we need to fire-smart areas and do a lot of proactive things way in advance, such as building firebreaks around remote rural communities and making sure they are planted with deciduous trees, which are moister and cooler and help service fire breaks. Yes, we need more preparedness, and we need to buy water bombers. The De Havilland Canadair 515 was mentioned earlier by one of my colleagues. It is built partly in Calgary and partly in Sidney, British Columbia. Right now, these water bombers are back-ordered, and all the orders are for the European Union because they ordered a lot of them. The European Union coordinates which countries need them the most and where to send these water bombers.

The thing about these forest fires, these 21st-century fires, is that they are different. Have members heard about the zombie fires? They stay below the surface of the soil through the winter. They can have snow cover on top, but the zombie fires are still there, ready to break out in the spring. That is one of the reasons we had fires spread so fast this spring.

In the time I have left, I want to focus on the things we can do. One of them is to acknowledge what John Vaillant succinctly testified to the Standing Committee on Natural Resources: “the oil industry is...a fire industry”. This is tough. It is that kind of inconvenient truth we do not want to hear. We want to be able to protect our resources. Bitumen is a very valuable product, probably too valuable to burn if we start thinking about it and start planning ahead.

We need to ensure that we give to our children a planet on which they can survive and not allow the climate crisis into an unstoppable, irreversible, self-accelerating spiral with positive feedbacks that leave us with the floods and the heat domes, but beyond that, with the collapse of human civilization. We do not have to accept that. We may be on the very edge of too late, but it is not too late to put in place the mitigation and adaptation measures that will help us preserve the Canada we love on the planet we love.

[Laila Goodridge, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is really hard to sit here, as the member for Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, as the member from the Green Party decides to disparage my community and put out inconvenient untruths. It is the reality that during the Fort McMurray fire, when people were giving outpourings of support, she blamed it on climate change rather than having compassion. Many of her speeches tonight have been very pointed and not trauma-informed. Many of these people who are fleeing fires are literally escaping, sometimes, with the clothes on their back. This is not something to be politicized. We can have those conversations later. Right now, we are in an emergency debate to talk about what we can do right now to help these people.

This is not about trying to get political wins, but there she is yet again, having a political win rather than getting to the bottom of this.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am sorry my friend from Fort McMurray feels that way.

I have not had any speeches tonight until now, and in asking questions, what I have said tonight is that our thoughts are with the people running for their lives. The hon. member may have missed it, but I have been through this with my family in B.C. We have been through floods where friends disappeared down the river in their home, and their bodies were never found. We have been through forest fires and on fire alert for evacuation, when we did not know where we were going to go when the word came through that we would have to go.

There are things we need to do for emergency preparedness, and we are not prepared in this place right now to talk about what we need to do as a country, to work together to save lives, when it is right in front of us that people are running for their lives. Yes, it is traumatic. People do not get over it overnight. Their kids do not get over it. They get nightmares for a long time, and maybe people do not get to go back to work for a very long time after having heat stroke in a heat dome.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it is really quite unfortunate that my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands could not give her speech at the beginning of this emergency debate, since it was full of wisdom and facts. I have also read Mr. Vaillant's book and found the points she raised very interesting.

Unlike my Conservative colleague who asked the previous question, I wanted to ask my hon. colleague about any common positions that might be shared among the political parties, because that is important. It is time to take action—

[The Deputy Speaker, Tom Kmiec]

I will have to stop the hon. member there to give the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands a chance to respond.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we need to work together. We have to deal with this crisis. It is urgent.

In the Speech from the Throne, not a single word was said about the Paris Agreement. I think the government may act soon. I hope so, but there was not a word about it in the throne speech.

Now, we have to face this crisis, be honest with the people of this country and work together to reduce greenhouse gases, protect our economy and at the same time prepare to adapt to severe climate events.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I think it is pretty rich that the Conservatives try to make the claim that my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands is playing politics. I will take people back two years ago, when the former MP for Kelowna—Lake Country, Tracy Gray, tweeted about the carbon tax instead of calling for help while her community was being evacuated because of forest fires.

All night, my colleagues have heard Conservatives make the claim that the reasons for these wildfires are human-caused. Maybe the member can talk about what has happened to our ecosystem and the damage that this has caused right now.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Courtenay—Alberni, because he has reminded me that one of the solutions I wanted to mention is the First Nations' Emergency Services Society, which is based in B.C. and is a great model that should be rolled out across the country.

I have mentioned the heat dome a few times, because it was traumatic to have 619 British Columbians die within four days, but on the ecosystem, what a lot of people do not know is that the heat dome also affected life in the oceans. Three billion sea creatures died, so some of my constituents in the heat—

[The Deputy Speaker, Tom Kmiec]

Resuming debate, the member for Fort McMurray—Cold Lake.

I am telling the member now that I will interrupt her at midnight.