Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
Graphic Truth: Canada braces for wildfire season
As the weather warms, the US and Canada are bracing for the potential of another record-breaking wildfire season. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season was the most destructive on record, with more than 6,000 fires tearing through tens of millions of acres and blanketing the US East Coast and Midwest in smoke.
Meanwhile, the US saw the smallest number of acres burned in more than two decades last year, thanks tohigh levels of precipitation and snowfall, which kept the West mostly out of trouble. But it also experienced its deadliest wildfire in over a century in Maui, Hawaii.
Canada's federal officials are warning that this season could be even worse. Warm fall and winter conditions, combined with droughts and next to no snowfall from December to February in essential areas like southern British Columbia and the Prairies impact soil moisture levels, raising the risk of fires.Are the US and Canada ready for wildfire season?
Last year marked the worst wildfire season ever recorded in Canada as 18.5 million hectares of land burned — shattering the previous record of 10 million hectares in 1989. Those fires accounted for 23% of global wildfire carbon emissions in 2023. They also sent toxic smoke throughout the country and into the US, putting the health and safety of Americans at risk.
At one point, New York City had the worst air quality in the world as Americans were exposed to more smoke per person than ever before. The smoke, which reached as far as Florida, also put US crops at risk.
This year might be as bad — or worse — which means that domestic and cross-border policies for fighting fires will be more important than ever.
An early start to the wildfire season. Last week, Alberta declared an early start to the wildfire season. Dry conditions and warm weather brought about the premature arrival – roughly ten days ahead of the typical season. This comes as the province faces water shortages and prepares for a severe drought atop predictions of a dangerous fire season for the province.
Meanwhile, zombie fires continue to burn both there and in British Columbia — more than 150 of them never went out last year and managed to stay alight throughout the winter. Experts say the scale of the problem is unprecedented.
South of the border, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillendeclared a state disaster on Monday as wildfires threatened residents near North Platte, mobilizing the National Guard to fight the blazes. Compared to Canada, the US wildfire season in 2023 was modest, but experts warned the calm could be atypical.
The year is barely underway and the US has already witnessed a record-setting fire. Texas on Thursday was battling the second-largest wildfire in US history and the largest, most destructive fire in the state’s history. The deadly, vast blaze, which began on Monday, has since spread across over one million acres.
Worse years to come. Climate change is exacerbating wildfires as the same hot, dry conditions that have started the season early in Alberta make them more likely to start and harder to fight year after year. The coming seasons will approach or break records, with the US set to face the effects from both domestic wildfires and Canadian counterparts. In 2023, summer warnings pointed to a heavy year for both countries as “unprecedented” fires raged and spewed smoke across the border.
In January, observers were already worrying about the 2024 fire season in Canada, citing a combination of climate change and the El Niño effect, which will produce conditions favorable for wildfires. Last year was the hottest on record for the world, and as routinely warmer years are set to be the norm experts are calling for proactive, cooperative policy responses across borders.
Cross-border cooperation remains resilient. For years, Canada and the US have managed to cooperate on shared concerns — even during times of political challenges.
“Regardless of the politics, cross-border cooperation between provinces and states, and between agencies and departments of both federal governments, is good and seamless regardless of the political leaders in power," says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s global macro-geopolitics practice.
The cooperation, Thompson says, is thanks to a “seamless and well-rehearsed order of operations.” The two countries even managed to keep that cooperation up and running during the Trump years, which were, to say the least, fraught.
Recently, the need for cross-border efforts to manage disasters has grown. As the fires raged and smoke blanked much of the continent last summer, Natural Resources Canada and the US Departments of the Interior and Agriculture signed a memo of understanding committing them to enhanced cooperation in fighting wildfires. They pledged to focus on building out a framework for mutual assistance, cooperation, and procedures for resource sharing. That work is ongoing.
A few weeks earlier, in an interview with the CBC, Canada’s then-minister of public safety and emergency preparedness Bill Blair said he’d spoken with the head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) about better cooperation between the two countries, including the potential for “a NORAD-like approach,” noting that emergencies including floods, earthquakes, and wildfires were “borderless.”
At the same time, Canada — which doesn’t have a central, national disaster management agency — was also considering creating its own version of FEMA. Since then, discussion of those options has fallen off the radar (sure to return before long), but the US and Canada are nonetheless prepared to cooperate across the border to fight fires in 2024, guided by the Arrangement on Mutual Assistance in Fighting Forest Fires.
Gordon Sachs of the US Forest Service says the arrangement is “fully in place” and “has no end date.” The origins of the deal, which allows the US and Canada to share expertise and operations capacities to fight fires, stretches back to 1982. Sachs points out that since the 1980s, Canada and the US have provided fire fighting resources to one another in 37 of 40 years.
The newly-enhanced arrangement will take things further. Sachs says the 2023 renewal “goes beyond fire suppression to include training, research, and post-fire activities such as rehabilitation and restoration of burned areas.”
Whatever the 2024 fire season brings, US-Canadian cooperation on disasters, including wildfires, will likely increase in years to come. Climate change is already exacerbating natural disasters and their effects, many of which, as Blair noted, are borderless. Changes in the US administration in 2024 could prove a challenge at the worst possible time, but if past is prologue, there’s reason to believe cross-border cooperation on disaster responses will remain reliable.
Perp walks, plane crashes, and debating the future
On any other day, we might start our GZERO North newsletter with the housing crisis afflicting the US and Canada and what, if anything, the federal governments should do about it (they have to act, and mewling an excuse about this not being federal jurisdiction is the political equivalent of “the dog ate my homework!”).
Or maybe you’re thinking, hey GZERO, what about this ugly dispute between Canada and the big tech giants like Meta, which has already led to the banning of Canadian news on Facebook and will likely lead to a digital services tax of 3% by January. Won’t the Biden folks, in an election year, pump out some retaliatory tariffs to send a signal to other countries that says: “Don’t follow those northern syrup-suckers and Thelma-and-Louise it off the digital trade cliff! Read our lips: No Digital Tax!” So, is this the start of a nasty little US-Canada trade war?
Probably, but it’s hard to focus on all those … After all, as I write this, we’re awaiting an unbelievable sight: a presidential perp walk. Yes, former President Donald Trump is in Georgia to slouch his way toward Fulton County Jail, this time alongside 18 others. (Trump and the 18 would be a good name for a band, with a remixed single called “91 Problems”). But even that is barely the headline. What about last night?
In the land of “Laverne and Shirley,” Republicans adopted lines from the long-running sitcom’s theme tune: “Read us any rule – we'll break it” to do it their way (well, their new way, at least). Sans Trump, eight political benchwarmers got to star in the Milwaukee political exhibition game known as a primary debate. Outside of picking the winners and losers (we did that in our morning newsletter, check it out), the real message was: The Republican center cannot hold.
For every moment that former VP Mike Pence tried to defend the classic Republican stance on, say, support for Ukraine, or that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley looked for consensus on abortion, or former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suggested that Trump’s conduct was unbecoming of the presidency, the responses reflected a party being pulled right by the gravitational force of Donald Trump. Oops, I forgot to mention Ron DeSantis. He was stolid in that wooden-puppet-comes-to-life-kinda way but was a bit … forgettable, which is his biggest challenge. (Meanwhile, as the debate aired, Trump was over on X, formerly known as Twitter, with Tucker Carlson, rehashing conspiracy theories on how convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was killed and no doubt pinching ratings).
Almost all of the candidates said they would support Trump if he becomes the nominee, even if convicted, but none more so than the human Trump pom-pom, Vivek Ramaswamy.
The super-smart, accomplished, splashy, 38-year-old is approachable, compelling, and extremely far to the right of the others. Dismantle the department of education and the FBI? Yup. Pull support from Ukraine? Yup. Climate change is a hoax? Duh. Still, the political neophyte is making the fringe fashionable, and he kinda won the night. Vivek’s debate prep, which included his inexplicably bizarre topless tennis training video, must have also included a four-course meal of Energizer bunnies because he hyperactively hopped from topic to topic, lobbing electric zingers that made him the major candidate in a minor group.
Foreign governments like Canada, which have already admitted spending a fair bit of time prepping for another Trump administration (more on that below), must now recalibrate. Trump is no longer an outlier surrounded by some corrective forces; he is the insider surrounded by sycophantic forces. Any new Republican administration would mean all bets are off for alliances, trade deals, and an American-led multilateral world.
And even that’s not the headline. I haven’t even mentioned Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s long-expected demise two months after he mounted his mini-insurrection. Putin has not admitted he downed Prigozhin’s private plane, but give the man his bloody due: Putin is the Air Jordan of assassination, and if his logo was not on the killing, his brand was all over it.
All of this means what to the US-Canada relationship? It means the world outside the neighborhood is getting more chaotic, and so is the world inside of it. Lest you think the problem is only on the Republican right, it ain’t. Both Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau are facing angry electorates, struggling economies, and are both about as popular as a free plane ride with Prigozhin. Meanwhile, silver-spoon spoiler Robert Kennedy Jr. is sawing off the radical left flank with his antisemitic medical memes and doing weird topless training videos of his own. Progressives are doddering to find their own way forward, and their efforts don’t look too hot either.
In other words, the summer silly season of politics has come to an early end, and we need to make sense of things now more than ever.
The fire-ravaged town of Lahaina on the island of Maui in Hawaii.
Fires undermine tourism in B.C., Maui
Tourist operators in both British Columbia and Hawaii are suffering as a result of catastrophic wildfires. Both want and need potential customers to return, though travel restrictions remain in the parts of B.C. that are still on fire.
In Maui, 115 are confirmed dead and hundreds remain missing as a result of the wildfires in Lahaina, which experts blame on climate change. The blazes destroyed the historic town, and more than 8,000 people have been thrown out of work by the sudden collapse of the tourism industry. Still, other parts of Maui remain open for business, and tourism operators in those areas are hoping visitors will return before they go broke.
Gov. Josh Green launched an appeal on Tuesday, asking tourists to return. “When you come, you will support our local economy and help speed the recovery of the people who are suffering right now.”
In British Columbia, where the fires are still burning, the industry is worried about the long-term impact because the area’s brand is dependent on its natural beauty. But travel bans on fire-stricken areas are likely to remain in place for some time.
A medical worker administers a nasal swab to a patient at a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) testing center
Hard Numbers: COVID hospitalizations, fiery moves, banking job cuts, traffic jams
21.6 & 7: Data from the CDC and Canada’s government show that, since last week, COVID-19 hospitalization rates have risen in the US and Canada by 21.6% and 7%, respectively. The Canadian number seems low, but it follows an 11% increase the week before, putting hospitalizations 20% percent higher than they were last year. Both countries are seeing increases in positive cases – early signals that a fall COVID wave could be approaching while updated booster shots are still weeks away.
13: Following the wildfire summer from hell and the smoky conditions of the past two years,13% of Canadians say they would consider relocating to a place that feels safer, according to a new Angus Reid survey. Many have seen their health problems worsen because of the poor air quality during this record-breaking wildfire season.
2: The Royal Bank of Canada, the Toronto Stock Exchange’s most valuable company, is cutting 2% of its workforce – despite making Q3 profits that towered over the other Big Six banks. Following an earlier cut in May, it has just announced that it will cut another 2% of its workforce this quarter. It cites overhiring and the need to set aside capital for potential credit losses due to rate hikes.
199 vs. 236: This could drive folks crazy. Drivers in Toronto spend 199 hours a year in rush hour traffic, and in New York City, they can expect to spend a whopping 236 hours stuck idling each year. Hollywood star Tom Cruise recently criticized Toronto’s traffic during an interview for his “Mission Impossible” (he shot the movie there) tour. But, according to this study by the UK’s Nationwide Vehicle Contracts, Cruise’s mission would’ve been even more impossible in the Big Apple.A view shows wildfires near a highway in Yellowknife, Canada.
Canadian fires cause city-wide evacuation
Around 20,000 residents of Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories, have been ordered to evacuate as deadly wildfires engulf the area.
Most are fleeing by car, but those who were unable to could register for evacuation flights, according to authorities.
The area around Yellowknife is the epicenter of the province’s diamond-mining industry – in 2016, the world’s largest new diamond mine opened up 175 miles from Yellowknife.
The scenes of hurried evacuations, blinding orange blazes and plumes of noxious smoke engulfing neighborhoods have come to define the summer for many Canadians, as the country grapples with its worst wildfire season on record. So far, 13.2 million hectares (32.6m acres) of land have been destroyed and a whopping 196,000 Canadians have been forced to flee from their homes – more than the past six years combined, according to fresh data.
The Graphic Truth: Canada wildfires scorch records
Canada’s 2023 wildfires are burning at a record pace. Blazes have forced thousands to evacuate, burned hundreds of homes, and resulted in four deaths. Smoke from this intense season has brought haze to North American skylines, worsening air quality for Canadians and Americans.
The season started early due to hot, dry weather conditions across Canada, and the amount of forest and land burned by the 4,765 fires has blown away the damage done over the last two decades.
To demonstrate how unprecedented Canada’s 2023 wildfire season has been, we look at two decades’ worth of data on land burned in wildfires in the US and Canada.
Smoke rises from the Texas Creek wildfire south of Lillooet, British Columbia.
Where there’s fire there’s smoke
Americans living along the Eastern Seaboard can be forgiven this summer for thinking Canada’s number one export to the United States is smoke. Once again this week, wildfires in eastern Canada have sharply reduced visibility in New York City and other cities in the US Northeast. But even residents of southern states like the Carolinas and Georgia are feeling the effects. Now, fires from Canada’s northwest are triggering air quality alerts from Portland, Oregon, to Plano, Texas. Some 44 million people in 28 states and Washington, DC, have been affected.
Firefighters in Canada are reportedly battling as many as 900 fires across the country, with two-thirds of those burning out of control. This year’s fires have burned more than 26 million acres in Canada, about 850% the usual number. The previous record, 17.5 million acres, was set in 1995. Canada’s wildfire season will continue for a few more months.
Aware that extreme weather events have both human and economic effects, governments in both countries are pledging to spend more on plans to help the most vulnerable citizens protect themselves. You can read a good summary of what policymakers are up to on both sides of the border here.