More On The Canadian Fires

The more I look into the Canadian fires, which seem to have become an annual event that sends enormous amounts of pollution accross the border to the US, the more I'm convinced that Canada has a vast world resource in its boreal forests over which it's incapable of exercisng stewardship. Even more so than in the US, most of its wild territory is publicly owned, 89% to 40%, but in the US, this territory is almost entirely under federal control, via the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Fire prevention and control are managed at the federal level, under consistent national policies.

The only equivalent national agency in Canada is Canada Parks, which manages fire prevention and control within national parks. Based on my research, Canada Parks actually has enlightened forest management policies, including controlled burning, but these apply only within national parks. The rest of the wild boreal forest areas are under individual provincial control, with policies differing across provinces, but the provinces generally have discouraged controlled burning and stress fire suppression.

The picture I'm beginning to see is that Canada is seeing the results of Fabian socialist policies it inherited from the mother country, and these policies overall have inhibited economic development to the point that the country can't afford some basic activities of a fully functioning nation-state, including a military and a national wilderness management system. This is especially concerning considering most of developed Canada is within a hundred-mile-wide zone along the US border, with the rest of the immense country a vast empty quarter that itself affects world climate, but the Ottawa government is neither willing nor able to exercise effective stewardship over it.

The Canadian response to Trump's criticisms has been to blame climate change:

Prime Minister Mark Carney was asked about the U.S. government position, and he immediately hit back by saying [in French] the cause of Canada’s wildfires is ‘climate change’ and President Trump’s unwillingness to support the Paris Climate Treaty has created the problem that Canada is now dealing with.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse says at the link,

Prime Minister Mark Carney makes his “climate change” blame argument in French because he doesn’t want to be put on blast by an American alternative media system who have caught on to his duplicity and will make his insanely insufferable arguments go viral.

Let's acknowledge that at least in recent years, extreme wildfires in the Canadian boreal forests have become annual events.Of the 2023 wildfires alone, Nature says,

The 2023 Canadian forest fires have been extreme in scale and intensity with more than seven times the average annual area burned compared to the previous four decades. Here, we quantify the carbon emissions from these fires from May to September 2023 on the basis of inverse modelling of satellite carbon monoxide observations. We find that the magnitude of the carbon emissions is 647 TgC (570–727 TgC), comparable to the annual fossil fuel emissions of large nations, with only India, China and the USA releasing more carbon per year. . . . Such conditions are likely to drive increased fire activity and suppress carbon uptake by Canadian forests, adding to concerns about the long-term durability of these forests as a carbon sink.

Overall, the annual Canadian wildfires have placed Canada, hardly an industrial power, as the fourth-largest carbon emitter, above countries like Germany and Japan. But the official position of Canadian government leaders is that this is someone else's fault. This was the New York City skyline as of yesterday:

It's hard to think of these annual pollution events that overflow into the neighboring country as anything but a profound national embarrassment, but this is Canada.