Canada’s Constant Wildfire Failures Are a Humiliation

Michigan descended into an apocalyptic haze of smoke this week, blown down on the cursed winds from our neighbors to the north. Vast swathes of forest burned across northern Ontario, just like the last two summers, with their smoke blotting out the sun for days and turning the air acrid.

Many would love to blame the nebulous entity called “climate change” for this, but it simply isn’t true. The real cause, of course, is Canada itself.

Canada is best described not as a nation, but as a failed state that hasn’t won a Stanley Cup since 1993. In its current form, Canadian national identity seems to rest mostly on opposition—to Trump, to America, and to Canadians themselves.

The Canadian dollar continues to slide to all time lows, and the Canadian economy has an aging population, declining industry, and many of the same woes plaguing Michigan.

The previous Trudeau government’s solution to this, of course, was to create an even larger hazard than the wildfires. Canada, during his tenure, imported tens of millions of foreign migrants.

The population shift has been massive, and jarring for the historic Anglo-Canadians that have called Canada home for generations. In just the last decade alone, whole towns and neighborhoods have been replaced by foreign migrants.

The other solution has been, of course, ripping off the United States on trade, to the tune of $80 billion in some recent years. The state of Michigan alone sent off $23 billion alone to Canada in 2022, which it didn’t get back in return.

Despite these desperate attempts to keep the Canadian GDP afloat, it’s been on a downward trend since 2023. There’s only so much tax money to go around, and the portions aren’t growing.

That’s where the wildfires come in. Canada’s forest management strategy the past few decades shifted from wildfire prevention, to active wildfire containment.

With less active forest management—decreasing dry fuel loads through contained burns and such—there are more dangerous wildfires per year, which then eat up more and more of the overall budget.

Every year there are fewer resources for preventing future fires, because they’re too busy spending all the money to put the current ones out.

It’s a classic case of managed decline. We see it all the time in America, in our urban cores especially. Governments get lazy, or corrupt. Maintenance, all the little things that keep a city running, falls to the side.

Eventually, the entire budget is spent dealing with emergencies, instead of the things that could prevent them. We spend more on policing, with worse results, while parks and public spaces are overtaken by criminal drug use and vagrancy. Everyone suffers as the commons fall into ruin.

Unfortunately for Michiganders, we breathe the same air as Canadians, and we’re at the mercy of their failed government and woefully inadequate forest management strategies. If we had, say, a political union, maybe there’d be a way for us to solve the crisis and stop enduring these ridiculous smoke clouds every summer.

Because, despite what the quasi-religious zealotry of the climate change crowd will tell you, this crisis is actually solvable. Not through ritual ablutions or pagan offerings, like green-energy credits and de-carbonification.

It takes cold hard cash, and good management.

Canada just needs to put more money and resources, and more practical managers, in charge of the Canadian Forestry Service. To shift from their hands-off approach to silviculture, and start actively managing their forests more directly.

The problem is, they don’t have the money, and they’re unlikely to anytime soon. Nor do we expect the liberal Carney government to sober up and embrace a practical solution, instead of just throwing up their hands and blaming climate change.

In the end, for Canadian and American liberals alike, the wildfires benefit them politically. They help to craft a narrative where the sky is falling, and the only solution is to vote for the Left, which promises offerings to the neoliberal climate gods to stop it.

This is the real difference between the political right and left in North America at the moment. The Left promises managed decline, tighten your belt as everything, even our air, gets worse. The Right promises to actually do things, to flip the switches that solve the problems instead of just whining about them.

Too many forest fires? Maybe the forests are too big, with too many dry trees for fuel. Cut them down a bit and burn off a bit of that dry timber safely every year. It really isn’t rocket science.

Getting an inept government to do it—on the other hand—that might take a miracle.