What Can You Save (Part 1 of 3)

What Can You Save? (Part 1 of 3)

Climate resilience is becoming the true test of Canadian leadership. This is the first in a three-part series.

The New Rhythm of Summer

When I was a kid, summer meant something different. We built bonfires that would make today’s fire chiefs faint. Nobody talked about evacuation plans or checked air quality indexes before heading outside.

We worried about mosquitoes, not smoke.

Every summer now, my aunt in British Columbia begins asking herself the same questions.

Do we have enough trailers? Where can we move the animals? Which roads are still open?

It isn’t panic. It’s preparation.

She and her family live on a small ranch, and over the years wildfire season has quietly become part of the rhythm of their lives. Long before smoke appears on the horizon, they check the trailers, call neighbours and begin contingency plans. Everyone hopes they won’t need them.

Sometimes they do.

Sometimes they have only hours.

Another aunt lost her home in the Kelowna wildfires years ago. People watched the mountains, convinced they understood how the fire would move. They believed the terrain would slow it—that there would be time.

There wasn’t.

The wind shifted.

The fire crossed where no one expected.

Her home was gone.

This summer I’m in Newfoundland with my daughters. Here, too, the conversation has changed. Friends talk about evacuation routes, road closures and what they would take if they had only minutes to leave.

I found myself saying something I never imagined I would routinely say in Canada.

Put together a go-bag.

Keep your medications together.

Know where your passports are.

Pack food for the dog.

Have drinking water ready.

Make sure someone knows where you’re going.

These aren’t conversations I remember from my childhood.

They’ve become part of Canadian summers.

Fire doesn’t knock.

It jumps highways, leaps rivers, changes direction with the wind.

It asks only one question:

What can you save?

Fire Doesn’t Ask Who You Are

The fire itself is impartial. It doesn’t care whether you’re wealthy or struggling, whether you live in British Columbia, Ontario or Newfoundland, or whether you’re Indigenous or not.

But vulnerability isn’t.

Some families have insurance, multiple vehicles and another place to stay.

Others have one road out, aging infrastructure or nowhere nearby to rebuild.

Fire reveals those differences with startling clarity.

For a long time, many of us thought of wildfire as something that happened somewhere else—another province, another summer, another headline.

Today, it feels different.

Smoke drifts across provincial borders and into American cities.

Entire communities evacuate.

Families wonder whether they’ll have a home to return to.

Canada has always lived with wildfire.

But the scale is changing.

In 2023, Canada experienced the most destructive wildfire season in its recorded history. More than 15 million hectares burned—an area larger than England and more than six times Canada’s historical annual average. Scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change made a season of that magnitude significantly more likely.

Those numbers matter.

But what they really represent are interrupted lives.

Families forced to leave their homes.

Children breathing smoke-filled air.

Communities wondering whether they’ll ever fully recover.

Climate change, once discussed as a future risk, has become part of our lived experience.

And that changes the conversation.

This is no longer simply an environmental issue.

It is a question of public safety, economic resilience, national preparedness—ultimately, leadership.

If ordinary Canadians are already preparing for this new reality, then our governments must prepare for it too.

A National Problem

The stories I’ve shared aren’t unusual.

Across Canada, families are quietly adapting to a reality that has changed faster than our politics. Wildfire seasons are lasting longer. Fires are behaving in ways that challenge decades of experience. Smoke now travels thousands of kilometres, affecting communities far from the flames themselves.

This is no longer a regional problem.

It is a national one.

Communities have been evacuated across the country.

Indigenous Nations, many in remote areas with limited road access and housing, continue to bear a disproportionate share of the burden.

According to Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy, First Nations make up about five per cent of Canada’s population but account for roughly 42 per cent of wildfire evacuation events.

This year’s fires have made those statistics painfully real.

As of mid-July, more than 2.38 million hectares had already burned across Canada, with 859 active wildfires, including 113 considered out of control.

Thousands of people had been forced from their homes, and the entire community of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in northwestern Ontario was destroyed in less than an hour.

That reality forces us to think differently about climate resilience.

It isn’t simply about protecting forests.

It’s about protecting people.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

It is also becoming one of Canada’s defining economic challenges.

The federal government estimates that climate-related disasters could cost Canada’s economy about $25 billion annually—roughly half of the country’s projected economic growth if we fail to adapt.

And that is before you count what Mark Carney’s government is quietly cutting to make room for other priorities: Environment and Climate Change Canada’s operating budget, cut by 7.5 per cent this year alone—the first stage of a planned $1.3 billion reduction by 2030.

The financial cost is staggering.

The human cost is impossible to calculate.

Our leaders have to answer for both.

And next, I’m naming which ones.

Part 2: Whose Job Is This? examines who’s actually responsible for climate resilience, and how Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia and Ottawa are each measuring up.