Whose Job Is This (Part 2 of 3)

*This is the second in a three-part series on climate resilience and Canadian leadership. [Read Part 1 here.]*

Every summer now, families across this country ask the same question my aunt in British Columbia asks every fire season: what can we save? Wildfire seasons are lasting longer, burning hotter, and costing more — this year, more than 2.38 million hectares already, with hundreds of fires still out of control. Climate-related disasters could cost Canada's economy $25 billion a year. And in the middle of it, Mark Carney's government is cutting Environment and Climate Change Canada's operating budget by 7.5 per cent this year alone, the first stage of a $1.3-billion reduction planned by 2030.

So who's responsible for fixing that? The honest answer is: more people than we usually admit, and not all of them are who you'd expect.

Canadians are remarkably practical people. We like problems with a clear owner. When the snow falls, we know whose plow we're waiting for. Climate change doesn't come with a single driveway to clear, and that's part of what makes it so hard to hold anyone to account for.

Whose Job Is This?

When disasters grow to this scale, Canadians naturally look to Ottawa. But our federation divides responsibility in ways that are not always well understood. Under Canada's Constitution, provinces are primarily responsible for forests, natural resources and wildfire management. Decisions about forest management, FireSmart programs, prescribed burns, staffing levels and emergency preparedness are, for the most part, provincial responsibilities. That means climate resilience isn't built only in Parliament. It's also built in provincial budgets.

Every premier holds a version of that power in their own province, and every one of them deserves the same scrutiny. I know two of these leaders well enough to speak about them with real assurance: Doug Ford, because I lived and worked in Ontario for most of my life, and Mark Carney, because as prime minister his decisions touch every province at once, including the one I live in now. Different parties, different jurisdictions, the same test. Millions of people voted for each of them. That's not a technicality — it's the whole basis of the claim on our trust. Neither gets a pass because of what's printed on his party's sign, and neither should stand in for every other premier making the same calls elsewhere in the country.

Ontario offers a clear example of the gap between rhetoric and budget. In 2025, the province spent $271 million fighting wildfires. Heading into a season that has already produced more fires than all of last year, Premier Doug Ford budgeted just $150 million — then called it "despicable" when critics pointed out the shortfall. There's a kind of dark comedy in a government spending more energy on the press conference where it calls the criticism despicable than it spent on the budget itself. I'd laugh, if the smoke weren't real. The province has added firefighting positions and new aircraft in recent years, which matters. But thanking firefighters at a podium costs nothing. Funding them before the smoke arrives is the actual test, and this year, Ontario failed it on paper before the season even peaked.

I saw an earlier version of this pattern up close. It's part of why I left Ontario. While I lived in Prescott-Russell, I watched clear-cutting spread across the county as corporations moved in and convinced farmers to sell off their woodlots for cash, land that was supposed to be converted to agriculture and often just sat cleared instead. Local mayors mostly went along with it. It tracked with a wider shift: since 2020, Ford's government has passed four separate bills stripping power from Ontario's conservation authorities, the local bodies that once had real say over development on wetlands and woodlots, all in the name of speed. "Open for business" was never subtle about what it was open to.

That isn't simply an Ontario conversation. Every province, from British Columbia to the Atlantic, now faces the same question: are we investing enough in prevention today to reduce the cost of disasters tomorrow? Some are meeting it better than others. Manitoba's Wab Kinew has now led his province through two consecutive severe fire seasons, and rather than disputing the numbers, his government published a formal after-action review of last year's response. That's what taking the test seriously looks like. It shouldn't be the exception.

Alberta's Danielle Smith offers the sharper contrast. Asked directly this year whether she accepts that climate change is driving up wildfire risk, she deflected, pointing instead to arson investigations, while pushing forward a new bitumen pipeline to the coast she's called "transformational wealth."

British Columbia has its own version of the same gap, just on forests rather than fire budgets. In 2021, a government-appointed panel recommended deferring logging on 2.6 million hectares of old-growth forest. Five years later, every member of that same panel signed a letter saying the province is failing to protect it — the areas the province announced for deferral turned out to be mostly second-growth or non-forest land, real old growth kept falling, and police were still arresting protesters at cut blocks on Vancouver Island last year. Different party, same tell: an announcement standing in for the thing it announced.

Quebec City, where I live now, offers a rare example of a promise actually being kept. Its tramway project will fell roughly 1,500 mature trees along the route, including decades-old ones on René-Lévesque Boulevard that residents are right to mourn — a young sapling takes five to ten years to provide anything like the shade or carbon capture of what it's replacing. But the city committed to planting 20 trees for every one it cuts, 30,000 in total, and as of this summer it had already planted roughly 22,000 of them, well ahead of schedule. It's not uncontested, and it doesn't undo the loss on René-Lévesque. But it's a government being held to a hard number and actually hitting it, which is rarer than it should be.

I don't know enough about what Newfoundland and Labrador is doing to hold its government to the same account here, and I won't pretend otherwise. But the picture across the leaders I can speak to is mixed rather than uniform — Kinew and Quebec City show it's possible to take the test seriously. Most of the others are still reacting to fires and forests as they burn or fall, and moving fastest on the projects that have nothing to do with either.

The federal government carries different responsibilities. When fires overwhelm provincial capacity, Ottawa coordinates military assistance, supports evacuations, assists Indigenous communities and helps finance recovery. But as fires become larger, more expensive and more disruptive, Canadians should expect more than emergency funding after each crisis. We should expect a national vision.

From Response to Resilience

For decades, Canada's approach has been reactive: mobilize extraordinary resources once disaster strikes, then rebuild. Those efforts save lives, but they also reveal an uncomfortable truth — we invest far more in responding to disasters than in preventing them. Canada's own National Adaptation Strategy admits as much, committing to shift toward long-term resilience rather than simply rebuilding after the fact. Strategies alone don't protect communities, though. Implementation does — and implementation means funding what we already know works: FireSmart programs, prescribed and cultural burning, forest restoration, and the Indigenous-led stewardship that predates the country by thousands of years.

There is no technology that will eliminate wildfire, and no fleet of water bombers large enough to extinguish every fire burning across millions of hectares of boreal forest. As wildfire scientist Mike Flannigan has observed, a warming climate means more extreme fire behaviour should be expected, not less. The question is no longer whether Canada will experience severe wildfire seasons. It's whether we prepare for them — and preparation asks for something our political system rewards poorly: patience. Most resilience investment produces no ribbon-cutting ceremony, no campaign slogan. Its success is measured by disasters that never happen. That is difficult politics. It is not what we are currently getting.

I think often, now, about my aunt checking the horse trailers each summer — the way that small, repeated act of preparation is really a form of stewardship, practiced long before anyone else is paying attention. That's how change usually begins — not with governments, but with ordinary people quietly preparing because they love someone.

What Kind of Country We Build

Wildfires are forcing us to ask questions that reach far beyond emergency management. They are asking what kind of country we intend to build. Canada has always understood itself through its landscapes — our forests, our lakes, our rivers, our Arctic, our coastlines. They have shaped our economy, our culture and our identity. For generations, those landscapes represented abundance: forests meant timber, rivers meant hydroelectricity, the North represented possibility. Increasingly, they remind us that abundance also carries obligations. The question is no longer simply what Canada can take from the land. It is how well we care for it in return.

Climate resilience is often described as an environmental issue. It is. But it is equally an economic issue, a public health issue, and increasingly, a nation-building one. That means it cannot remain a program sitting at the edge of government — it has to shape how governments build roads, design bridges, finance housing and plan infrastructure for a changing North. For decades, Canadians were asked to choose between economic prosperity and environmental responsibility. Increasingly, that is becoming a false choice.

Building Wisely

That conversation now belongs to Prime Minister Mark Carney. His government has cast itself as one built for a harder climate — nation-building infrastructure, resilient systems, a country prepared for what's coming.

Mark Carney's government is cutting Environment and Climate Change Canada's operating budget by 7.5 per cent this year alone.

That is not a rounding error. It is part of a planned $1.3 billion reduction by 2030. Fisheries and Oceans Canada is facing an even steeper cut on paper: Budget 2025 proposes reducing DFO's budget by $544 million, including $500 million and 551 full-time positions eliminated by 2028–29. The consequences are already visible — DFO cut its salmon monitoring and charter patrol contracts by roughly two-thirds heading into the 2026 season, leaving many remote coastal streams unwatched at exactly the moment wild salmon populations are under the most pressure. You cannot claim the mantle of climate resilience while quietly defunding the science that tells you where the next fire, flood or collapse is coming from.

I know what these cuts look like up close. My daughter works for Fisheries and Oceans, helping Inuit communities use data on fish, shark and whale populations to manage their own waters. Ottawa has already cut her team, and she doesn't know if her own job is next. She sends me photos of polar bears now — animals swimming hundreds of kilometres to find food, or conserving energy because the sea ice they hunt from is disappearing earlier every year. That isn't a distant projection. It's happening in real time, to the people and animals whose lives depend on the exact monitoring this government is defunding.

Carney is not a man who lacks the capacity to understand what these numbers mean. Before politics, he wrote *Value(s)*, a five-hundred-page argument that societies systematically undervalue public goods like environmental protection in favour of short-term market thinking, and warned explicitly against choosing efficiency over resilience. That was the diagnosis. Cutting climate science while fast-tracking a $90-billion rail line is the disease he wrote the book about — a cut that will eliminate roughly 840 full-time positions at the department, by its own confirmation. He also spent years as the UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, tasked with mobilizing the global financial system behind exactly the kind of climate transition his own government is now underfunding at home. An unprepared government stumbles into bad priorities. A man who wrote the book on this one, and was paid to sell it to the world, has to decide to do it anyway.

The list of what's moving forward is long. A high-speed rail line between Toronto and Quebec City. New pipelines under negotiation with Alberta. LNG terminals on the British Columbia coast. Critical mineral mines from New Brunswick to Nunavut. Also on that list is a hydroelectric project near Iqaluit, Inuit-led, meant to replace diesel dependence with clean power — proof that not everything on the nation-building agenda deserves the same skepticism. The problem isn't that Canada is building. It's what building has been allowed to displace.

I understand why Canadians get excited about projects we can see. A new rail line. A new terminal. A new mine. They're tangible, ribbon-cuttable, photographable. Preparing for a disaster that never happens is much harder to celebrate — its success is measured by nothing going wrong, which doesn't make for much of a press conference.

Canada is the only G7 country without high-speed rail, and if there were money enough for everything, building Alto would be an easy yes. The problem is the sequencing. The $60 to $90 billion for that line — linking Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City — is moving forward while Carney's government cuts water protection, coastal monitoring and climate science. And the line itself has a narrower audience than the price tag suggests: it stops in the major cities, full stop. The farmland and small communities it cuts through get the expropriation, the disruption, the loss of access — and no station, no stop, no use of the thing their land was taken for. I know part of that corridor. It runs through the agricultural land of the region I used to call home. Carney's government is good at explaining what it's doing and why, in polished talks and social media clips. I'll admit there's something almost funny about it — I can watch a beautifully produced video about a $90-billion train while checking a wildfire map on the same phone, in the same scroll, as if the two screens belong to different countries. What Carney's government hasn't done is answer the more basic question underneath: why tax dollars from the whole country are funding a project built for the few cities that already have everything, while the places actually burning get told the cupboard is bare. Canadians can see that gap without it being explained to them. Treating them as though they can't is its own kind of failure.

This isn't a partisan complaint. A lot of the people who put Carney in office weren't lifelong Liberals. Some were conservatives who crossed over, against their own party, because the alternative felt riskier, and because the country doesn't have many other options for federal leadership right now — and because no one wants to hand ammunition to separatist movements in Alberta. That vote was an act of good faith, made in a moment with no good alternatives. Carney is spending that good faith on a high-speed line through farmland and briefing lines about "throwing every resource we can," while his government quietly defunds the science that would tell us how bad the next fire season will be. Call it what it is: a government using the trust it was given for one kind of promise, and spending it on something else.

Can Canada build faster while also building more wisely? The answer should be yes — but wisely has to include the science budget, not just the announcement. Economic growth and climate resilience are not competing visions. In a country increasingly shaped by floods, fires and extreme weather, they depend on one another.

Perhaps that is the greatest leadership challenge facing Canada today: not simply responding well to disaster, but learning to govern well before disaster arrives.

*Part 3, tomorrow: what proactive leadership should actually look like, starting now.*