Global Courant
More than 400 wildfires are burning thousands of acres of forest and land across Canada in an “unprecedented” start to the wildfire season.
Ken McMullen, president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, says he has never seen such an early and devastating start to the wildfire season in his career, marked by large fires in rural regions.
“We’re seeing fires like we’ve never seen before, at an earlier stage in the month of May than we’ve ever seen,” McMullen told CTV’s Your Morning on Wednesday.
Volunteers make up the bulk of Canada’s firefighting capacity and set aside their day jobs when called upon. McMullen estimates that of the 126,000 firefighters nationwide, between 80,000 and 90,000 are volunteers.
“It’s unbelievable,” he said, suggesting most Canadians are clueless. “The volunteer system has been around for ages and it mostly works. What it’s not designed for is for the long, sustained, drawn out events similar to what we see in the wildfires.”
Given current needs and the expectation that they won’t be reduced in the future, McMullen says there should be more incentives for people to become volunteer firefighters.
“Currently, our volunteers get a tax break of up to $3,000,” he said. “I know we use the term volunteer, but the fact is that some form of compensation is given to these volunteers in our communities and we’ve asked the government to increase that tax incentive from $3,000 to $10,000 a year.”
On June 8, 2022, six fires burned out of control, among active wildfires covering 30,575 acres.
The most recent data available, according to data from the National Wildland Fire Situation Report, as of May 31, 2023, 45 fires were out of control and 2.7 million acres of land had burned.
Given the extreme season, McMullen says fire crews are “absolutely exhausted.”
“But they continue to do what they do every day, which is to go out and do everything they can to keep ourselves safe in our community,” he said.
McMullen says training for more firefighters, including Indigenous firefighters, would also help.
“Indigenous communities just have a very different understanding of fire,” he said. “They use it differently, they respect it differently, they’ve lived on the land for so long that they understand the fire risk in their city… They also protect their communities in a very different way than we do.”
Click on the video at the top of this article to watch the full interview.
