Air quality resource for Canada. Today, where I live and for much of S Alberta, is at highest risk. The smoke smells like burning bitumen (puke!) and frac fumes (triple puke!!!), I cannot see my favourite view, and the air is so dried out from the winds and fire heat, I can barely breath.
Mark Carney should understand better than anyone why Canada is burning. Here’s how he can change course by John Vaillant, June 5, 2025, Toronto Star
John Vaillant is the author of The Golden Spruce, The Tiger, and Fire Weather: The Making of the Beast. Fire Weather won the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize. Born in Massachusetts, he lives in Vancouver, B.C.
“They’re baaack …”
Even if we haven’t seen “Poltergeist II,” most of us know those iconic lines. Wildfires, it could be said, are Canada’s poltergeists, only scarier and deadlier. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been watching the latest sequel as colossal boreal fires kill citizens (two so far), trigger evacuations (in the tens of thousands now), and send toxic smoke plumes across the Atlantic and deep into the United States. But there’s a key difference between our poltergeists and Steven Spielberg’s: Canada’s fires aren’t “back” because they never went away. North America’s 2023 fire season — the worst in Canadian history — has never really ended. From Mexico, Arizona and California to Oklahoma, Florida and western Canada, the continent has been burning — above and below ground — all the way through the winter of 2024. Between November and March, wildfires killed people and destroyed structures in Connecticut, New Jersey, Oklahoma and, most notoriously, in Los Angeles.
In some cases, these fires have been burning for years. Holdover fires, also known as “zombie” fires, smolder underground during the winter months, surfacing again in the spring, but this year, Mike Flannigan, Research Director of the Western Partnership for Wildland Fire Science at University of Alberta, has observed something new:
“This is the first time I’ve seen fires in Canada survive two winters and I’ve been watching fires closely since the 1970s,” he told journalist Chris Hatch. “A number of these fires started in 2023, burned through the winter … continued to grow in 2024 and then survived this winter.
Climate scientists have predicted an eventual blurring of “fire season” into year-round burning for decades, but few imagined it would arrive so soon in our northern forests. There are knock-on effects to this relentless pressure and one of them is evacuation fatigue — not for the evacuees themselves (that’s a given), but for their hosts.
High Level, Alberta has formally announced that it will not be taking in wildfire evacuees this year. Thousands passed through this remote hamlet of 4,000 during the record-breaking 2023 season, which saw a quarter of a million Canadians driven from their homes by wildfires, nationwide. That’s a shocking stat, but not as shocking as this one: last year, Conrad Sauve, the CEO of Red Cross Canada, told me that when he started working for the Red Cross in the early 2000s,
“eighty per cent of our work was outside Canada. Now, eighty per cent of our work is inside the country.”
Most of this new internal demand is coming from weather-related disasters, exacerbated by an ever more erratic and violent climate. In other words, Canada, an otherwise stable democracy, now has an internal “refugee” problem, and we’re going to see many more: in terms of hectares burned by this date, 2025 is rivaling the terrible summer of 2023. Around two million acres have burned so far and Flin Flon, Manitoba was evacuated last week (along with many smaller communities across the country).
While the town remains standing, there is no guarantee it will continue to do so under the current conditions. It’s still early in the season, but 30,000 Canadians have already been forced to leave their homes due to wildfire. It’s going to be a long, expensive summer, and the end of it no longer guarantees an end to the fires that season used to reliably contain.
Another knock-on effect of these worsening fires is higher insurance rates, and many homeowners in western Canada are feeling the pressure. In fire-prone parts of the U.S., fire insurance has become simply impossible to get, and this has profound impacts on our economy. U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse summed it up well last June when he said,
“This isn’t complicated: Climate risk makes things uninsurable. No insurance makes things un-mortgageable. No mortgages crashes the property markets. Crashed property markets trash the economy.”
This is a language Prime Minister Carney, a former banker, should understand.
And I think he can understand this, too: one way to view our current economic system is as a global Ponzi scheme — powered by fossil fuels and leveraged against the future of the living world.
The most accurate way to calculate the debt on this system of fossil-fuel-powered — which is to say, fire-powered — civilization is by measuring CO2.
If we understand industrial CO2 as debt, then heat is the interest on that debt. Starting around 2000, global temperatures began rising steadily and noticeably. What this tells us is that our CO2 debt level has become unsustainable, and the ‘interest’ un-payable — to the point that we now find ourselves in the default zone.
Typically, when we default on a loan, the bank calls in the debt; they might even repossess your stuff.
This is one way to understand the steady increase in fossil fuel-enhanced weather disasters: these floods, fires, heat waves, and intensifying storms are the Bank of Nature’s repo men coming to collect on that debt — “repossessing” our homes, our cars, our towns, even our very lives.
There has been a lot of talk of pipelines lately, but in light of the clear and present danger posed by fossil fuel expansion, what kind of “energy superpower” should Canada aspire to be? Conventional, or renewable? Keep in mind that 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history, and that CO2 levels have just exceeded 430 parts per million for the first time in three million years.
The longer Canada and other major economies remain hostage to the fossil fuel industry (which is currently trying to weaken protections for oil workers in dangerously hot conditions), the worse these fires, floods, heat waves and droughts are going to get, the busier the Red Cross is going to be, and the more evacuations, heartbreak and PTSD Canadians are going to suffer.
Prime Minister Carney understands this brutal calculus, but how is he going to answer the question that follows? How many more citizens need to be evacuated; how many more cities and towns need to burn; how many more Canadians need to die before Ottawa gets the message and begins liberating our country and our economy from fossil fuel dependence — or should we say, captivity?
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Capitalism is burning the world: Canada’s wildfire season by John Clarke, 5 June 2025, Counter Fire
Visions of Canada Burning / Photo: Duncan Rawlinson / CC BY-NC 2.0
Canada’s new liberal prime minister has given the lie to the notion that a green capitalism is possible with fossil-fuel friendly policies as the climate crisis intensifies, explains John Clarke
Though we are still well short of the official start of summer, large parts of Canada are already being impacted by devastating wildfires. On 2 June, the CBC reported that 17,000 people in eleven communities were subject to mandatory evacuation orders in the province of Manitoba alone.
George Fontaine, the mayor of Flin Flon, stated that ‘I’ve been expecting to hear catastrophic news, and so the fact that I’ve not heard that has really made me feel a whole lot better. But we’re still in the same situation. It’s a time bomb.’ None of the town’s structures had been burned at the time of the report but the entire population of 5,000 had been evacuated.
Out of control
The fire threatening Flin Flon covered an area of 40,000 hectares and was ‘still listed by the province as out of control.’ A 200-person fire crew was attempting to save the town, using ‘two heavy helitankers that can carry massive bags of water, three smaller helicopter buckets, three water bombers and 19 pumper trucks.’ Fontaine grimly noted that, ‘We have everything that can be thrown at it that’s available. Provincially, they are stretched so thin.’
The pressure on available fire-fighting capacity flowed from a situation where ‘there were 25 active wildfires in Manitoba. There has been a total of 106 already this season, far above the province’s 20-year annual average of 84 at this time of year.’
In neighbouring Saskatchewan, early wildfires are also happening on an intensified scale. ‘As of 30 May, there have been 207 wildfires this year, which is 40 more than last year at the same time, [including] the 300,000-hectare Shoe Fire in northern Saskatchewan.’
Colin Laroque, head of soil science and professor at the University of Saskatchewan, noted the highly combustible condition of the province’s forests. ‘Saskatchewan’s forest and grasses were mainly brown from the dry weather and made great fuel for grass fires,’ he pointed out. Moreover, ‘In Northern Canada … we’re experiencing more than three times what the global average is in terms of temperature change.’
Less extensive but still very significant fires are burning in northern Ontario, with some of them out of control and parts of Alberta are also being impacted. In Northern British Columbia, one fire caused evacuation orders to be issued after it quadrupled in size.
The vast quantities of smoke given off by the fires are already having an impact on major urban populations. ABC News has reported that, as of 2 June, ‘there (were) 181 active wildfires burning in Canada, with 92 of these considered to be ‘out of control’. In this situation, ‘the smoke is bringing potentially dangerous air quality conditions to parts of the northern United States.’
The evidence that wildfire seasons in Canada are becoming more destructive and that this is attributable to climate change can no longer be seriously disputed. A fact sheet issued by the Canadian Climate Institute notes that accelerating ‘climate change, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, makes wildfires bigger, hotter, and more frequent. With Canada warming twice as fast as the global average, and home to more than a quarter of the world’s boreal forests, the country is experiencing this consequence of global heating firsthand.’
The sheet shows that wildfire ‘activity is increasingly frequent across Canada’ and that fire ‘season is starting earlier, is lasting longer, and is harder to contain.’ Moreover, elevated ‘wildfire risk means that, whatever the cause, fires catch, spread, and get out of control much more easily.’
Clearly, Canada’s wildfires are becoming ever more destructive and toxic but they are only one dreadful element of an intensifying climate disaster that threatens life on this planet. Yet, even the most catastrophic climate impacts and the starkest evidence of the need to curb carbon emissions aren’t leading to effective climate action by those in political power. Indeed, as I pointed out in an earlier column for Counterfire, the coming to power of the second Trump administration has led a reduced reliance on forms of ‘greenwashing’ deception and a return to obdurate climate denialism.
Destructive projects
As Canada’s forests burn, governments at the provincial and federal level are preoccupied with dealing with the crisis that Trump’s trade war has unleashed. The focus is on boosting ‘competitiveness’ and diversifying trade, in order to withstand the shocks generated by the US turn to protectionism. In this regard, a huge emphasis is being placed on developing the extractive industries and increasing oil and gas exports, regardless of the climate and other environmental impacts.
Ontario’s Conservative government is in the process of passing Bill 5 into law. This is a direct response to Trump’s tariffs and it features the establishment of ‘special economic zones’, where, as Amnesty International has explained, ‘critical provincial laws, including those protecting endangered species, clean water, and consultation with Indigenous Nations, may be suspended to fast-track development.’
The federal Liberal 
Harper-Congovernment of Mark Carney, casting its ‘progressive’ credentials to the winds, is taking very much the same approach as the Ontario Conservatives.
On 1 June, as CTV News explains, Carney ‘sat down with oil and gas executives in Calgary Sunday to discuss partnerships and to get their input for his plans to make Canada an energy superpower.’ He ‘held a closed-door roundtable with more than two dozen members of the energy sector.’ Yup, he’s a vile Harper con, and not even trying to hide it
As Toronto Today reports, Carney told media while he was in Calgary that he favours ‘a shift in “mindset” to get major projects off the ground quicker by bringing in a “single window” of approval.’ He stated that at ‘the moment, when we’re thinking about new projects, too often the immediate question is “Why?” Instead, we need to ask ourselves “How, how do we get it done?”.’ It if talks like Harper, walks like Harper, quacks like Harper, cons the public like Harper, it’s a Harper con.
As he set out his plan to promote environmentally destructive projects on a massive scale, Carney pathetically pledged to ‘focus on making it as clean as possible’.
He also held a meeting the next day with the provincial premiers in Saskatoon to promote his energy superpower theme and to incorporate their destructive plans into his agenda.
‘We need to move on these nation-building projects. So, projects that bring Canada together, projects that diversify our economy, projects that help us export to new markets and really move this economy forward,’ Carney stated before meeting with his provincial counterparts.
In 2014, when he was governor of the Bank of England, Carney told a gathering of the Bank of International Settlements that the brand of ‘inclusive capitalism’ that he advocated ‘is fundamentally about delivering a basic social contract comprised of relative equality of outcomes; equality of opportunity; and fairness across generations.’ He also asserted that ‘unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism itself.’
In 2021, in his role as UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, Carney made similar assertions on how enlightened self-interest should lead capitalists to take effective action to deal with the climate crisis. He claimed that major companies were accepting the need to transition to renewable energy and eliminate carbon emissions, grandly proclaiming that this ‘is a market that is really being driven by corporate ambition and commitment to net zero.’ No such thing as net zero except in the imagination and oil and gas industry’s propaganda
The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of Carney’s greener inclusive capitalism are now fully exposed.
As Canada’s prime minister, he presides over a trade crisis that threatens the vital interests of the country’s major companies. In his efforts to deal with that crisis, he is more than ready to make common cause with climate-denying right-wing politiciansHe’s a con and fits right in so as to fast-track oil and gas projects that will worsen global heating with appalling results.
Canada’s 2025 wildfire season, though it is only just getting underway, is already another step towards climate disaster. Ironically and tragically, the fires burn out of control as the political decision makers conspire to make the situation even more catastrophic. No solutions will come from Mark Carney and his accomplices. Only massive and powerful action by a united movement for climate justice can make a difference in this situation and the present Canadian wildfires drive this home with a terrible emphasis.
Refer also to:
2025: 2024 Wildfires, fossil fuels, (war and genocides?) cause biggest rise in CO2 pollution ever recorded at Mauna Loa Observatory. Human response so far? A pail of water tossed, missing the fire.And massive shutting of agencies collecting climate change and fire data by the orange Nazis
2024: Canada: Total number wildfire evacuation orders annually (1980-2023)
2024: New study says after wildfires we must clean our homes, contents, clothes and replace HEPA filters.
Wall of Wildfire at Frac Central Alberta, Fox Creek. Photo by Kyle Brittain