The wildfires in Northern Ontario have resulted in some of the worst air quality days on recorded record.

While the average air quality of cities like Toronto is still better than historically, this has still resulted in a renewed conversation about wildfires.

When analyzing wildfires, it is important to look at the entire picture. Much of the media coverage will focus on response, as this is when people are most interested.

The reality with many hazards like this though, is that the other components are generally not taken as seriously.

During a response, people tend to find it distasteful to talk about other aspects of the risk controls, it can come across as victim blaming or otherwise be misconstrued as hurtful.

It can also be interpreted as a distraction from ongoing response efforts, which could have a negative impact on immediate life-saving efforts, which complicates the issue.

Unfortunately, when it comes to addressing these sorts of problems, it has been a long-understood reality that people, and funding channels, only really care about an issue for at most around a month after their inception, so really the only realistic opportunity to request change is during the ongoing disaster, usually in the response or very early into the recovery phase.

If people don’t put the long-term risk controls in place during the disaster, then the disaster and generally be moved-on from and control will not be implemented.

Response

Response will be discussed first as there is an active wildfire ongoing at this time.

There are two broad components of a wildfire response: protecting people, and fighting the wildfire.

Protecting People

When protecting people, first the decision needs to be made if they are sheltering-in-place or being evacuated. With most large wildfires, evacuation tends to be preferred. 

Once people have been evacuated, especially if done-so in a hurry, it is usually expected that they will not be entirely self-sufficient. Emergency shelter systems are usually used to meet their needs in the short to medium term.

Sometimes this is done through asking locals to assist in the area they have been evacuated to. In some cases, people will help strangers by letting them stay in their home because of this emergency. This is more common in some cultures than others and is generally not an assumed strategy, more of a nice-to-have if it happens from an emergency management perspective.

In Ontario, evacuations due to wildfires are fairly common. It is generally considered to be an annual event. The scope or scale will change from year-to-year but some degree of evacuation during wildfire season is planned for and anticipated.

Certain cities have a regular season where evacuees will take shelter. In effect, it is regular hazard-caused seasonal tourism.

The success of an evacuation is dependent on a variety of factors. Fundamentally, the problem is moving people from one location to another, this is a logistics issue.

There has been some criticism around bus availability for the current wildfire evacuations. This is a fairly common challenge.

Certain roads being compromised due to the wildfire also becomes an issue. If there is not enough notice to get out in time, or people delay too long, routes can become more practically unavailable over time.

If there are two major roadways out of an area and one is blocked by fallen trees that are on fire, it tends to create greater congestion on the other remaining road.

Fighting the Fire

Firefighting generally comes back to one core concept, the fire triangle (or tetrahedron).

As with any fire, all these elements must be present in order for the fire to continue to burn.

Various measures are employed to target each component, some more practical than others depending on how the fire is behaving.

Water is used to reduce the heat in the area and to smother the fire. 

This method is used to ideally attack the fire from both heat and oxygen. Waterbombing has been recently mentioned in the news. These are aerial bomber planes which launch a water payload. This is one of many applications for introducing water to a fire.

Mop Up and Patrol

After the fire has ‘passed’ that does not necessarily mean it has stopped burning. Spot fires and risks to reignition are identified and precision targeted. This is effectively another application of water usage.

Firebreaks are a method used to attack the fuel source. 

Sometimes during an ongoing wildfire, firefighters will actually burn a section of the terrain downwind preemptively. The idea is that when the fire reaches there, the fuel will already be used up, with no fuel the combustion stops. Any area that has been created or modified to be without fuel for the fire can be a firebreak, this does not necessarily mean lighting fires in all cases. As an example, a coastline would be a massive firebreak.

Sometimes instead of burning the area away, forestry equipment will be used to rapidly remove a section of forest to create a firebreak. Any method that removes the fuel can qualify as a firebreak.

Incident Management

Dealing with wildfires is often a very large-scale task. The total area that needs to be covered is vast, resources are usually very limited, and situations can change very rapidly. Also depending on interference from particulate matter in the fire, some communication infrastructure can become unreliable.

It is one thing to have the resources, it is another to know where and how to deploy them in a timely manner. The incident command system, a core competency in emergency management that is regularly used for all incidents types, was invented in the 1970s in Southern California to fight wildfires.

Prevention/Mitigation

These are the measures that work to stop or lessen the wildfires before they happen.

As with many large-scale hazards, the cost of managing the risk using prevention and/or mitigation is usually 10x or more cost effective than the cost of the large-scale disaster.

The cycle usually goes something like this:

Disaster risk or wildfire expert advises that this is a problem and that funding prevention/mitigation in this area is effectively a no-brainer.

The issue is not taken seriously.

There is significant financial consequence, and some people die.

Said expert says some version of ‘I told you so’ and asks if it is going to be taken seriously now.

It isn’t taken seriously and the cycle repeats.

For the Ontario example:

In 2024-2025 the budget for Emergency Forest Firefighting was approximately 177 million.

In 2025-2026 the budget was $135 million (a reduction of about 24%).

For the year of 2025-2026, Ontario ended up spending $271 million on an emergency basis due to being insufficiently resourced.

There is a problem though, this is actually not prevention, this is still response. This budget cut is to the program for wildfire suppression, not prevention. Ontario’s strategy toward this hazard is to focus on response, not to prevent its occurrence.

Wildfire prevention is part of a different ministry, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR).

Within that, the budget allocated towards wildfire prevention is ‘Public Protection’.

This number has steadily increased over the years, but the exact breakdown of what it is used on is not specified. Public Protection has a scope that includes all natural-hazards: fires, floods, droughts, emergency response, etc. Even within this, as emergency response is included, this budget is not exclusively for prevention.

Here is a budget breakdown for this department over the last four years:

For context, this issue is not specific to a particular political party. This is a risk blind spot that has persisted for years.

Controlled/Prescribed Burns

A controlled burn is similar to a firebreak in that it is a measure that is done to remove fuel from the fire triangle. Unlike the firebreak though, a controlled burn is done before the wildfire starts to prevent it from occurring.

But why should people light forests on fire? Isn’t the point to avoid creating fires?

Technically no, the issue is not fires, the issue is very large uncontrolled fires.

Fire is part of a healthy forest ecosystem. Young trees generally don’t burn. When trees get very old and start destroying the surrounding ecosystem, fire is the forest’s natural way of ‘healing’. Fire is used to convert old and dead vegetation and improves the area so new things can grow.

Without fire, many forests would die. In fact, if one does some research into Canada’s boreal forest ecology, it becomes fairly apparent that wildfires are cyclical and we are supposed to be living with them as a reality of our ecosystem.

Fire prevention in this case is not about preventing all fires, but is about preventing fires that humans do not control.

Looking at it another way, any given tree in a boreal forest will one day grow old and burn. The goal is for humans to decide when and how that happens in a controlled manner. Wait too long, and nature will force the issue.

More stats: 45% of all fires in Canada are started by lightning strikes.

81% of all burned area are caused by fires that are started by lightning strikes.

Canada actually has a far higher percentage of fires caused by lightning strikes than other jurisdictions. For example, in the United States 10-16% of wildfires are lightning, the rest are human caused.

Paying special attention to the discrepancy in these numbers indicates something though. While fewer fires are started by lightning strikes, these fires tend to be massive and predominantly are the ones responsible for most of the biggest wildfires (in Canada).

The problem is not predominantly some moronic camper setting the trees ablaze, it is a random lightning strike deep in an uninhabited, dense forest. Hard to track, slow to respond to. By the time one finds it, it has already grown beyond most basic control measures. It is already too late.

This is precisely the risk that controlled burns are good at targeting.

Overall Recommendations

The first recommendation is going to be a bit visionary.

I have been asked about this issue multiple times, and ideally, the solution would be a massive undertaking which focuses a significant amount of resources toward this particular risk.

Forest fires are a risk category that Canada is uniquely positioned to gain a core competency and accel at.

My pie-in-the-sky, before working out the cost idea, would be to create a Manhattan-style project focused on this unique risk. More so about the scale of the undertaking, not about the secrecy and the nuclear bomb.

Build educational and training institutions specialized in this core competency on or nearby first nations reserves that already want to be involved in controlled burns and wildfire prevention.

Use this to create a massive service base of Canadians that excel at being world leaders in wildfire prevention and fighting. The long-term monetary benefit would be though:

1. Risk reduction from reduced losses of communities burning in Canada from wildfires.

2. Being contracted by other countries for our services in assisting with their forests.

On common roadblock that is identified in wildfire fighting is that it is very complicated professional work that very few people know how to do.

If that is the case, why not become the best at doing it? No country is better positioned. We have more boreal forest per capita than any other country in the world by a wide margin, this is something we should be the best at.

Coming back to reality, in the more immediate future here are some things people could do:

• Work on getting funding for wildfire prevention immediately. In about a month the opportunity will pass and the money will not be available. Take advantage of the disaster in the interest of preventing the next one.

• Personal emergency plans. Take the opportunity to ask oneself, what might I and my family do if a wildfire was near us? How would we evacuate? Where would we go?

• Work on one’s personal resilience and being ready for any disaster. Our previous article was on this topic.

• Consider becoming a firefighter, or for more broad disaster assistance, joining a local organization like Ontario Corps.

As a final note, while this piece may appear to be fairly critical of Ontario, this is not specific to the province, its particular government, or even Canada. People in general are very bad at appropriately addressing risks, especially prevention measures. 

To the Ontario government’s credit, they did recently create the Ontario Corps, a volunteer-based emergency response effort coordinated by the government, to help augment resources in a disaster. This is something professionals in emergency management have been asking for (for a long time).

While AmeriCorps exists in the United States, Ontario was the first place in Canada to adapt this model. This is to say that Ontario is the sort of place that actually could be a leader in solving the wildfire problem.

It is not that Ontario has not stepped up to the plate yet, no one has.

Learn more and watch the video here.

Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp. and is the author of Continuity 101.

He can be reached at info@prepared.ca.