Another summer, another spell of watching wildfires burn through Canadian forests. Another several weeks spent inhaling smoke in the cities while hearing about small-town evacuations. Now there are geopolitical implications as the American government threatens to tariff Canada over smoke wafting across the border.
As of July 24, there were 800 active fires, and more than 2.7 million hectares had burned this year. In Ottawa, a Senate committee has cautioned that Canada’s ability to combat wildfires was falling well short.
Surely, we can only benefit from expanding our water bomber fleets and other methods of responding to wildfires, but it is far better to prevent them than to respond after they ignite.
Proactive prevention on the landscape
One way to do that is to foster a revived and healthy forestry sector and integrate it into Canada’s wildfire response strategy. The consequences were laid bare in the summer of 2021, when the B.C. town of Lytton burned to the ground. In 2023, fires near Yellowknife resulted in the mass evacuation of the city. This year, much of the area around Boston Bar is suffering the same fate, while hundreds of residents in northern Ontario have been forced to flee.
Every town outside the major metropolitan areas is vulnerable during the summer heat. Even large cities are not immune. The 2025 Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles demonstrated that nowhere is entirely safe from the threat.
A government cannot stop lightning or command rain, but it can take measures to limit the spread of wildfires through controlled burns, pruning, and the removal of dead or fallen timber. All of these measures can reduce fire intensity and slow the spread of wildfires. We need people to do that—people with expertise in machinery and the ecosystems where loggers work.
Unfortunately, Canada seems to have fewer and fewer of those people every year.
Rebuilding forestry boots on the ground
Ontario’s forestry sector has shed more than 35,000 jobs since 2000, and harvest volumes have collapsed to below 60 per cent of what they once were. In British Columbia, forestry-sector employment fell from almost 6 per cent of all jobs in the province in 1997 to 2.3 per cent in 2016, despite a significantly larger population, though this had rebounded to 3.5 percent by 2024.
A forester, equipment operator, or mill worker is not a fire crew, and the average logger is not a certified burn boss. But working mills mean more people in the bush, monitoring regeneration and keeping watch for destructive insects and diseases that kill trees.
In Ontario, an independent audit of the Armstrong Forest found that mill closures, bankruptcy, and the near-cessation of regular harvesting reduced the province’s capacity for effective forest management. Is it really so radical to suggest that having hundreds of professionals working in the bush might have a positive impact on safety?
In B.C., the mountain pine beetle has killed vast swathes of trees, and many of the trees it has attacked retain dry needles, while fallen trees become fuel for fires. There must be sustained monitoring of these landscapes by people trained in forest ecology.
In fact, large areas of B.C. and Ontario that might have been logged and managed more actively during the heyday of Canadian forestry have instead experienced decades of regrowth, creating vast amounts of dense vegetation that become fuel for wildfires during dry conditions.
Public health and civic stakes
Canadians in the cities also have a stake in this issue. Health Canada estimated that wildfire smoke may have contributed to the deaths of 240 people from 2013 to 2018 through short-term exposure and 2,500 more through long-term exposure.
Forestry capacity is public-safety capacity. By fostering an economy in which mills can remain competitive and market access can be secured for biomass and low-grade fibre, Canada would create greater opportunities for research and innovation in forest management. Public money has a role to play, but a healthy forestry industry is the first line of defence. Loggers will have nothing to cut if the forest burns down first, and they have a tremendous stake in the fate of the forests in B.C. and Ontario.
We should employ more Canadians who know our forests, work in them, and help make them more resilient before another orange sky and poisonous atmosphere remind us of what is happening without them.
Geoff Russ is the editor-at-large of Without Diminishment. He is also a contributor to the National Post, Modern Age, and the Spectator Australia. He can be reached on X.com at @GeoffRuss3.
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