Kirk LaPointe: The heated politics of B.C.’s growing wildfires

We long ago politicized the forests of British Columbia. What’s changed is how we do it.

The late 19th century saw politically controversial concessions of large swathes of land in this province to companies, as they built winding railways and settled villages. The post-Second World War era had brought about contentious clear-cutting pitted against the earliest environmental concerns. The infamous War in the Woods at Clayoquot Sound in the 1990s saw government concessions and the emergence of logging restrictions and sustainable forestry practices. This most recent century further pushed the politics of the forest in bringing about court recognition of Indigenous forest management rights, following  decades of resistance.

The contemporary political theatre plays out in the differing strategies to contend with wildfires in the context of a recognition of climate change. The two principal political parties entering the B.C. election campaign, the governing B.C. New Democratic Party and the ascendant B.C. Conservative Party, are approaching these issues quite differently, with quite different consequences.

Wildfires are common enough now across Canada, but in B.C. they are now regularized to the point of an annual expectation. We track the snowpack and the late winter and early spring precipitation and can pretty much tell how much of a terrible fiery ride beckons, because the summers have become uniformly, new-normal hotter. In some parts of the province, the fallout features regular evacuation threats and orders, in some parts it’s the delivery of harmful smoke congestion, in others it poses impediments to summer economies of crucial tourism for towns entirely built around  an outdoor lifestyle that is slowly slipping away.

As I write, there are more than 320 wildfires alive in B.C., more than half of them out of control, with many more expected in the days ahead. For weeks we have experienced hot, dry weather, a typical batch of record-setting temperatures, extra smoke entering the northeastern corner of the province across the Albertan border, thousands fleeing their homes (most recently in Jasper, Alta.), and more fires ignited when humidity triggers lightning as part of inadequately precipitous thunderstorms.

Also as I write, the wildfires, perhaps surprisingly, don’t stand to be a pivotal election issue in October, nor in the federal election expected in the fall of 2025. Still, we are always one lightning strike, one spark near a freight car, one ill-doused campfire or one lit cigarette tossed into a highway ditch from its centrality in our lives and focus on its cause, and the caliber  (and, at times, the expense) of the response.

Policies to combat and mitigate wildfires here differ substantially, much to do with the seriousness with which climate change itself is taken. It seems the more you play down climate change, the more you emphasize the need for immediate investment in firefighting instead of down-the-road behavioural change.

It isn’t that the leading parties are going in different directions—no one wants the fires or fails to see their growing threat, no one wants to see communities burn, no one wants mills to shutter—than are taking different tracks to the same station. The campaign in coming weeks ought to see these distinctions surface in debates and promises.

The Conservatives take the view that governments can’t tax their way into wildfire submission and climate change mitigation. They advocate an end to the carbon tax, a measure introduced by a B.C. Liberal government in which Conservative leader John Rustad once sat as a cabinet minister, as minister of forests no less. The tax was once revenue-neutral but is today revenue-vital for the B.C. NDP government. If elected, Rustad will eliminate it provincially before a potential Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre might federally.

Indeed, Rustad was turfed from the BC Liberals in 2022 (later renamed BC United) for what leader Kevin Falcon said was a pattern of behaviour unsupportive of party policy. Rustad had retweeted a post by climate change skeptic Patrick Moore that the evidence of CO2 global warming “gets weaker every day.”

B.C. Conservatives also want more local than centralized control on the forest fires file, including a stronger investment in firefighting resources (including a dedicated wildfire unit), and more controlled burns to mitigate the intensity of fires. They want activists more thoroughly penalized for blocking resource development and argue that greater support for logging and mining doesn’t conflict with responsible wildfire policy.

The governing NDP’s approach spends more and more each year in firefighting, directly and through budget contingency funds, a new Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness, and its own prescribed burn strategy.

Adjacent to this disagreement  on how to finance climate resilience, and often conflating it, are radically different visions around the forestry sector itself—how it develops and is regulated. Party policies are tightly tethered to their differences on the importance of forestry as an economic driver and the debate on how many incentives or disincentives there are to take down trees.

Government relations with the industry have never been more acrimonious in recent memory.

Ask Jimmy Pattison, the province’s richest man and its most prominent forestry baron, and he’ll tell you  that his investments are heading anywhere but B.C. these days, eyeing instead Sweden, the United States, or Alberta. Even former NDP premier Glen Clark, who worked for Pattison for two decades after he left politics, but is still a card-carrying New Democrat, has taken to public criticism of his party’s onerous regulatory burden.

An emergent factor in recent years has been the movement to preserve the province’s parkland, a measure that reduces wildfire risk. Lately, the NDP has found conservation champions in people like Ross Beaty, a longtime mining executive, and even Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon, who aim to help preserve rather than develop timber, buy back mining claims, and hope to preserve 30 percent of the province by 2030.

The BC Conservatives disagree and Rustad vows to stop the drive. He sees it as expensive, both in terms of land acquisition and the opportunity cost of lost development of a resource sector crucial to this province’s economy. On days people look at their bank balances, they would agree; on days when they are figuring out which belongings to bring with them to a faraway hotel fire refuge, they might not feel so supportive.