MONTREAL — As of July 18 there were some 955 wildfires across Canada, the majority of them burning out of control, the Wildland Fire Information System reported. This includes 190 in northern Ontario. Dangerous smoke clouds have blanketed Canadian cities like Toronto, Hamilton and Thunder Bay, as well as Detroit, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. in the U.S. Air quality indexes reported some of the most dangerous levels in the world.
The capitalist rulers here are determined to blame the fires and threat from them on natural causes — anything but the responsibility of the profit-driven capitalist system and its disregard of the health and safety of working people.
“The United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted and unhealthy air,” U.S. President Donald Trump said, blaming Canada, and threatening to impose new tariffs over its “willful negligence” in forest management. “Climate change is everyone’s responsibility — truly everyone’s — including the United States,” Prime Minister Mark Carney retorted at a news conference July 16.
The fires have hit First Nations Indigenous communities especially hard. On July 13, some two dozen members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, about 600 miles northwest of Toronto, had to self-evacuate in small boats across a lake as they watched their community burn to the ground. They all made it out safely and are being temporarily housed in hotels in Thunder Bay. Helen Paavola, First Nation chief of the small community, said she called the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources for evacuation, but no help ever arrived.
Blaming ‘climate change’ is cover-up
The wildfires and toxic smoke today is a repeat of what happened in 2023, when cities like New York were covered with health-threatening, orange-tinted smoke from Canadian wildfires. Two years earlier, the Globe and Mail had run an editorial entitled “Canada’s massive wildfires are the result of decades of bad decisions.”
Then, as now, capitalist politicians blamed “climate change,” masking the reality that these “bad decisions” are the built-in product of the profit-driven priorities of the billionaire capitalist families and their government.
The fact that an estimated 12% of people in Canada — including one-third of Indigenous people on reserves — live where the danger of forest fires is greatest, is of little concern to them.
The union representing Ontario’s wildland firefighters, pilots and support staff publicly called out the provincial government for understaffing its wildfire response. The Ontario Public Service Employees Union said the province has about 153 fire crews available today, but needs at least 250 to adequately respond to today’s fire seasons.
“Whole communities are burning down. Not having enough staff is a result of intentional choices by the [Ontario Premier Doug] Ford government,” union President J.P. Hornick told the press.
Trump’s hypocritical comments ignore the fact that exactly the same disdain for working people was shown in the lack of response by authorities to the ongoing series of devastating fires from Paradise to Los Angeles in California.
Bjorn Lomberg, a well-known writer on the climate, headlined an article in the March 17 Wall Street Journal, “Gavin Newsom’s Climate False Alarms.” Disputing the California governor’s claims, Lomberg pointed out that NASA’s 25 years of satellite tracking of wildfires shows they have been declining around the world, but increasing in North America.
“Despite Mr. Newsom’s pronouncements, global warming isn’t the main driver of fires in North America,” Lomberg says. “Poor planning puts more houses in extreme fire-risk zones. California’s surge in wildfires stems overwhelmingly from poor forest management: decades of fire suppression that builds up fuels, with almost no prescribed burns.”
Things are no different here. “Canada is burning because of bad forest policy, not climate change,” headlined a June 14, 2023, National Post article by Kenneth P. Green. He points to a 2020 study in the journal Progress in Disaster Science. It concludes, “Despite the increasing occurrence of wildfire disasters in Canada, funding to support wildfire prevention, mitigation and preparedness have not kept pace with the increasing need.”
The evidence shows that it is the refusal of capitalist governments and public utilities over decades to allocate funds to hire the number of workers needed to clear dead wood from forest floors, carry out prescribed burns, build much needed low-cost housing for working people with fire-resistant materials, and other science-based measures that are responsible for today’s wildfire social disasters — not “climate change.”
Working with Indigenous communities, the labor movement in Canada needs to mobilize a social struggle to force the provincial and federal governments to immediately fund an effective national forest management program. It needs to be run under workers control, paying union wages, as part of a government-funded public works program, to rebuild housing and infrastructure destroyed by wildfires.