BRITISH COLUMBIA, June 24 (Portal) – Canada is grappling with its worst start to wildfire season on record, but recruiting firefighters is becoming increasingly difficult due to tight job markets and hard work, provincial officials say.
Limited resources could threaten Canada’s ability to extinguish fires that are expected to grow larger and more intense in the future due to fossil fuel-driven climate change, causing greater damage to communities and disrupting the country’s oil and gas, mining and logging industries could.
A Portal poll of all 13 provinces and territories found Canada employs about 5,500 wilderness firefighters, not counting the remote Yukon Territory, which has not responded to requests for information.
That’s about 2,500 firefighters who aren’t needed, said Mike Flannigan, a professor at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia and a wildfire specialist.
“It’s hard work, it’s hot work, it’s smoky work, and there are real issues with long-term health implications,” Flannigan said. “It’s getting harder and harder to recruit and keep people.”
That year, Ontario extended its application deadline, increased its marketing efforts, and began paying for training to attract more recruits. Applications dwindled in British Columbia and Nova Scotia, and Alberta had to go through multiple rounds of recruitment to fill its ranks, officials said.
Canada’s provinces and territories share crews and equipment as needed, and draw on international partners and the military in times of extreme need. But that year, record-breaking fires broke out simultaneously in the east and west, leading to competition for firefighters and planes.
“That was the worst-case scenario that everyone fears — multiple areas of the country burning at once,” said Scott Tingley, forest conservation manager for Nova Scotia.
Forest fire crews work 12 to 14 hour days, for up to two weeks at a time, in smoke-filled, stressful environments, often in remote wilderness areas.
The seasonal work, longer fire seasons, and uncompetitive base pay — which ranges from CA$30 an hour in British Columbia to CA$18 an hour in Manitoba — also put people off.
“We are in competition with a whole range of other job markets. It’s physically demanding and mentally demanding,” said Rob Schweitzer, managing director of BC Wildfire Service.
A week of cooler weather and rain mitigated some fires across Canada, but 6.5 million hectares (16 million acres), an area the size of Lithuania, were already burning this year and unseasonably hot weather is expected to return.
FILL THE GAPS
Record-breaking fires that year resulted in Canada sending around 550 military personnel and more than 1,700 international firefighters paid by the provinces to augment its overworked crews. As more wildfires threaten communities, provincial authorities are also increasingly turning to firefighters to protect homes.
But of Canada’s 126,000 structural firefighters, according to the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, 90,000 are volunteers who shoulder the burden of protecting their own communities while also holding part-time jobs.
At the height of the fires in May and June, some provinces called for additional wildfire recruits. Alberta dispatched 157 people to respond to a government deployment, Nova Scotia sent its first 30-person volunteer team last week, and Quebec trained another 300 volunteers and forest workers not normally part of its wildfire service.
The extra labor doesn’t come cheap. According to the federal government, the annual cost of protecting against wildfires nationally has exceeded CA$1 billion for six of the past decade and has increased by about CA$150 million every decade since 1970.
Most experts assume that they will continue to rise.
Since 2009, Canada has spent more fighting and suppressing wildfires than maintaining its firefighting workforce and program.
The federal government is spending CA$38 million to recruit, train and retain firefighters and is investing CA$256 million over five years in an equipment fund and working on a pilot project to train building firefighters. A spokesman for the Ministry of Emergency Preparedness said the government recognizes the need for further investment.
“The men and women who fight wildfires are doing a great job, but the fact is there aren’t enough of them,” said Ken McMullen, president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs.
(This story has been corrected to set Manitoba’s wage rate at $18 per hour in paragraph 10 rather than $0.74 per hour.)
Additional reporting by David Ljunggren and Ismail Shakil in Ottawa; Edited by Denny Thomas and Aurora Ellis
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