As we have learned, Quebecers will have to foot a heavy bill of around 200 million to fight historic wildfires in the summer of 2023 The newspaper. Costs almost seven times higher than the average over the last ten years.
“This year is quite spectacular in terms of the number of bills,” summarizes Stéphane Caron, prevention and communication coordinator at the Society for the Protection of Forests from Fires (SOPFEU).
The NPO estimates the bill Quebec taxpayers will have to pay in moving costs for 2023 at $200 million, Mr. Caron said.
Over the past decade, this amount has averaged 30 million, as Le Journal calculated based on the organization’s annual reports.
Fighting costs represent the expenses that SOPFEU spends on fighting forest fires and are independent of their operating budget, which is fixed.
SOPFEU’s detailed account must be officially published in the annual report next March.
Numerous external resources
The cost explosion is unsurprisingly due to the unprecedented scale of last summer’s wildfires, which burned more than 5.2 million hectares, an area larger than that of Costa Rica.
Since the 235 firefighters and 325 other employees were largely insufficient to fight these fires, SOPFEU had to look for personnel and equipment outside of the contract.
“In preparation for a season, we will contract 14 helicopters. We have them whether there is a fire or not. Due to the season we had, we were forced to go beyond the basic contract and increased the number to 88 helicopters at the same time,” explains Mr. Caron, among others.
In addition, there is the remuneration of hundreds of firefighters from all over the world as well as their accommodation and transport, sometimes by charter plane.
SOPFEU had to hire and pay hundreds of firefighters from abroad, like the French firefighters who fought fires in Haute-Mauricie last summer. Photo SOPFEU
“It is enormous what we count. If we provide an arena for the Koreans who come to Quebec to sleep, we compensate for that,” explains Mr. Caron in particular.
Increasingly in demand
Jonathan Boucher, a researcher with the Canadian Forest Service, argues that the permanent resources allocated to SOPFEU must take cost optimization into account because the intensity of fires varies from season to season.
However, they will inevitably have to be revised upwards due to climate change, he said. “In the intensive protection zone, we expect the firefighters’ workload to be five to six times higher between 2071 and 2100.”
However, it is still not possible to predict what task forest fires will pose in each season. “It is not a systematic increase, it means there will be ups and downs from year to year,” Mr Boucher added.
SOPFEU and its employees have not had a collective agreement since the beginning of 2023, while negotiations were disrupted by the volume of work to be done this summer.
Martin Dugas, representative of the Unifor union for SOPFEU firefighters in Bas-Saint-Laurent, Gaspésie and Côte-Nord, is also concerned about the attractiveness of the profession after this strenuous season.
“Spending 12 or 13 hours in the woods trying to put out fires when it’s hot and you’re exposed to smoke. Will the younger generation then say I’m attracted to that?”
Hundreds of foreigners as reinforcements
SOPFEU received help from more than 1,300 people from the rest of Canada and five other countries last summer. Some stayed for six days, others for up to a month.
- UNITED STATES: 530 people
- France: 343 people
- Portugal: 140 people
- Rest of Canada: 142 people
- Spain: 100 people
- South Korea: 100 people
Deletion costs for the last ten years at SOPFEU
- 2023: about $200 million
- 2022: $26,546,372
- 2021: $49,486,431
- 2020: $47,825,239
- 2019: $18,661,732
- 2018: $55,088,479
- 2017: $20,285,564
- 2016: $20,316,584
- 2015: $11,746,032
- 2014: $18,722,586
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