We’ll be waiting for a while yet to hear why stands of dead trees outside the Jasper National Park townsite were allowed to sit and wait for a catastrophic fire.
Twin probes are underway in Ottawa to crack the issue — one in the House of Commons, another in the Senate, but between jabs at the Harper government and time-wasting lines of questioning better spent on Wikipedia searches, they seem to be getting nowhere.
So far, the House has heard a mix of Stephen Harper blame, climate change shrugging, insistences that more must be done and various versions of “Well, we followed procedure — what more can you expect?” Senators, meanwhile, saunter through basic questions about firefighting that could be answered with a brief browse of Wikipedia.
On Tuesday, for example, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault headlined as a Commons committee witness. Conservative MP Gerald Soroka asked the minister whether he believed Jasper was the benchmark for proper fire management. Guilbeault answered with a positive: the fire prevention program used in Jasper will continue to be used. Our procedures are fine as is, he seemed to say.
Asked when he became aware of the large fuel load outside the town, Guillbeault answered that his government spent more on forest fire prevention than that of Harper. Question repeated, answer repeated: “We invested about 40 times as much as the Harper government in order to prevent forest fires in Jasper.” Blame Harper. Riveting.
Jasper, if you remember, was engulfed in flames in July after a century of excessive fire suppression, a few decades of pine-beetle ravaging and an unusually dry summer combined to create the ultimate tinderbox. The Harper government was one of many that was responsible for the park since its founding in 1907; though certainly not blameless, it hasn’t held the reins in nearly a decade.
More critical is the question of why tree removal — be it though prescribed burns or harvest — has been minimal, allowing the problem to get out of hand. So out of hand, in fact, that external parties have been cautioning the town about the surrounding “powder keg” conditions since 2018. For those keeping score, that was still years after Harper left office.
At the Commons committee, Dane Lloyd, another Conservative MP, pointed to the various warnings that had been raised in earlier years. Parks Canada senior vice-president Andrew Campbell, another witness, gave a pulpy boardroom answer:
“Through the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire counsel, of course, Parks Canada gets a lot of support and uses a cross-Canada, government-wide federal, provincial, standard of how forest fires are fought, what information goes into that —” He was cut off, presumably for giving information as general and as useful as a website’s “about us” page.
Campbell later defended his record with more precision: 17 square kilometres of trees had been removed in recent years, a buffer fire-resistant zone had been made to encircle the town and Jasper itself had a massive “sprinkler” (more like gusher) system to protect itself. Which at least is something — but it still doesn’t explain why so many dead trees blanketed the landscape. Jasper National Park is greater than 11,000 square kilometres, for reference; 17 of those is nothing, even taking into account the parts of the park that aren’t forested.
Lloyd went on to bicker with Guilbeault about how much of the budget under Conservative and Liberal governments went to the issue, yielding little of use.
Conservative MP Blaine Caulkins asked whether Guilbeault had directed the parks agency to take an accelerated approach to fire prep in recent years, only to receive a snappy answer: “I don’t imagine you know how a minister’s job works. And I don’t know if you’ll understand my answer. But it is not the minister’s job to micromanage four thousand Parks Canada employees and tell them how to do their jobs.” Caulkins was right to ask, though: what exactly was leadership doing?
Well, talking about climate change, of course. Guilbeault self-congratulated his record on fighting climate change in general and attacked Conservatives for not doing so. More jabs, no insight into how fire mitigation measures were or were not taken as the dry timber piled up.
Meanwhile in the Senate, the opposite has been the problem. No quippy, time-eating jabs, but few questions of great substance either. Tuesday’s committee meeting on fires saw its minutes eaten up by land acknowledgements and simplistic information-gathering that Senators could have more efficiently accomplished with a memo request. Questions along the lines of “Firefighting, how does it work?”
The Jasper fire post-mortem, so far, is more about optics than answers. Which is at least on theme with the rest of everything Ottawa does, even on the fire file. Indeed, in just February, a Parks Canada executive director pondered with a colleague on the topic of prescribed burns in Western Canada: “As more and more media articles raise public concern over drought conditions, public and political perception may become more important than actual prescription windows.”
Campbell explained to the House committee that these staff members were deciding between cutting down the dead trees and letting them burn, but it’s still curious that media articles have pull to begin with. When pressed at Wednesday’s meeting, he further explained that every opportunity to conduct prescribed burns was taken. Still, evidently, it wasn’t enough.
And that’s about all we know so far. The minister doesn’t direct individual staff members, which you’re to believe excuses Parks Canada for mismanaging its forests. The minister has, however, led the battle against climate change, which he will assure you plays far greater a role in the Jasper fire than the fields of fuel accumulating around its perimeter. And if his policies and procedures on parkland management got us into this mess, well, that’s Harper’s fault.
National Post