Canada’s auditor general found that Indigenous Services Canada spent approximately $646 million on emergency response and recovery over four fiscal years, compared with about $182 million on preparedness and mitigation. It spent roughly three and a half times more dealing with emergencies than reducing the danger beforehand. The auditor described the system as “more reactive than preventative.”⁷
Preparedness isn’t mysterious. It means clearing defensible firebreaks around communities, expanding prescribed and Indigenous-led burning, training and equipping local crews, strengthening water systems and communications, improving evacuation routes and deciding where people will go before the smoke closes the airstrip.
No amount of preparation can stop every fire. Canada is enormous, and lightning can ignite dozens of remote fires in a single storm. Some communities will always need to evacuate. But evacuation should be the final defense, not the permanent plan.
The history of fire suppression offers another uncomfortable lesson. For generations, Indigenous peoples used low-intensity burns to reduce undergrowth, renew useful plants and shape landscapes less likely to produce catastrophic fire. Colonial governments restricted those practices and replaced them with the idea that nearly every fire should be extinguished.
Now, after decades of accumulating fuel and increasingly severe fires, agencies are rediscovering Indigenous fire stewardship. Yet Métis wildfire researcher Amy Cardinal Christianson has warned that institutions sometimes want Indigenous knowledge without sharing authority with the people who developed it.
There is something painfully familiar in that sequence: suppress the practice, discover later that it worked, then invite Indigenous people to advise the system that replaced them.
The change across North America is not simply that there are more fires of every kind. In some places, the total number of fires has declined because small fires are detected and extinguished. The fires that survive, however, are increasingly capable of becoming enormous, long-lived disasters.
Canada’s 2023 season showed what that can mean. More than 6,000 fires burned about 15 million hectares—roughly 37 million acres, an area larger than England and more than twice Canada’s previous record. The normal annual average is closer to 2.5 million hectares.⁸
Here in New Hampshire, today’s smoke will eventually lift. We’ll reopen the windows, watch the sky return to blue and give the dog the longer walk he has been waiting for. For us, the fire will end when the wind changes.
For the people of Collins Lake, it will end only after they learn what remains, where they will live and whether their community can be rebuilt.
The boats worked. The people survived.
But survival by boat, with the flames behind you, shouldn’t be mistaken for either a climate policy or an emergency plan.