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Wildfires burning hundreds of kilometres away in northwestern Ontario obscured Toronto’s skyline in a thick, dramatic orange haze last week, triggering hazardous air quality warnings across the GTA.

For nearly five days, the heavy blanket of smoke trapped toxic particles over Toronto, drastically increasing health risks while the wildfires caused catastrophic damage in communities across northwestern Ontario. 

The unprecedented devastation has 91��ɫ experts debating whether Canada should explore a new national agency to manage wildfire response – or revamp the system in place. 

The recent fires in northwestern Ontario are now accelerating conversations about how Canada manages wildfires, which have gained momentum since fires tore through Jasper, Alta. two years ago consuming about a third of the town’s buildings.  

Since then recovery has remained painfully slow, highlighting the longterm impacts of the shorterm devastation of wildfires. As of March 2026, only 4 per cent of the 374 properties lost to fire have been fully rebuilt. Meanwhile, insured losses have swelled from early projections of $900 million to an estimated $1.3 billion, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

Those numbers have made Jasper a test case for a broader question facing Ottawa: should the federal government overhaul how it manages wildfires – perhaps by creating a national agency – or focus on fixing the system it already has? 

Across Canada, opinions diverge sharply on what that change should look like. The debate runs straight through 91��ɫ’s Disaster and Emergency Management program at the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, where two professors studying wildfires stake opposing positions. 

After a major fire, “it is all left to individual communities impacted to manage it themselves,” and a federally mandated framework would be beneficial, says Ali Asgary, 91��ɫ professor and director of the Advanced Disaster, Emergency and Rapid Response Simulation (ADERSIM) Lab, which uses large-scale simulations to model disasters and test emergency responses. 

His colleague, Professor Eric B. Kennedy, studies the human dimensions of fire and how people and institutions use evidence to make decisions in wildfire and other emergencies. Like Asgary, Kennedy shares “this sense that we need transformative thinking,” but argues that Canada should focus on transforming the systems and programs it already has, rather than building a new national agency from scratch. 

Both agree recent seasons have revealed how fragile Canada’s wildfire system becomes under extreme pressure – and that Jasper stands as one of the starkest examples. 

A system under pressure

When the Jasper wildfires erupted in July 2024, scarce resources and confusion over jurisdiction hampered early firefighting efforts, despite what officials described as a well-oiled crisis response. 

Ken McMullen, chief of emergency services for Red Deer Emergency Services and president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs (CAFC), served as an incident commander on the scene. One fire burned to the northeast of Jasper, while three fires to the south merged into a singular inferno racing toward town. 

Inside the blaze, the heat and winds acted like a convection oven, generating gusts as powerful as an EF-5 tornado with wind speeds exceeding 300 km/hr, uprooting trees and hurling flames up to 50 metres into the ir. When mountainside trees gave way, embers rained down on the town, setting homes and businesses ablaze. 

McMullen and his team coordinated the wildland, municipal and volunteer firefighting teams in evacuating 20,000 people, and deploying high-volume sprinkler systems, a rotating air fleet for water drops and hotspot detection, and continuous fuel removal to steer the flames’ path. 

Still, when air tankers were needed that first night, none of Canada’s 106-plane fleet was available – already committed to fires burning in other provinces. By the next day, the blaze had grown too large for water drops to make a difference. By the third, the wind and smoke made flying unsafe. 

It would take 47 days before the fires were declared under control. By the end of the 2024 fire season, two Canadian firefighters had died, including one in Jasper. 

Now, with wildfires raging across northwestern Ontario, McMullen, Kennedy and Asgary all agree that Canada is not ready, and they’re urging swift, systemic change at the federal level. 

“At the height of a wildfire season, everybody’s interested. Politicians are interested. Industry is interested to learn, what do we do differently?” McMullen says. But once major fires are extinguished, they’re on the back burner until spring. 

“We forget in January what we talked about in July,” he says. “We have to make it a 365-day conversation.”

A changing risk landscape

For Kennedy and Asgary, that conversation requires starting with fire itself and how it has evolved. 

Climate change has generated hotter temperatures and drier landscapes, altering fire behaviour and lengthening wildfire seasons around the world. Kennedy leads YEMERGE, a pan-University research network that studies how people, communities and institutions prepare for and respond to crises such as wildfires. His lab examines how local governments adopt mitigation programs such as FireSmart Canada, and how bureaucratic processes and staff turnover in government can hamper fire mitigation efforts. 

“The big challenge is the magnitude of what we’re facing,” Kennedy says. “We have huge forested areas. We have a lot of the [urban] interface at risk of exposure, we have a lot of historic building stock that is not necessarily fire adapted, and we’ve got challenges – like how to make housing more affordable that can, at times, be at odds with doing well on fire.” 

The 2023, 2024 and 2025 seasons were among the top five worst in Canada’s wildfire history. With 16.5 million hectares of land burned from coast to coast, 2023 was the most destructive on record, followed by 2025 at 8.9 million hectares. 

“When you have three consecutive years, you can’t say ‘unprecedented’ anymore,” McMullen says. “You can’t say it was ‘unpredictable.’ So if [fires] are predictable, that means that they are preventable.” 

91��ɫ’s Disaster and Emergency Management program is instrumental in making those predictions. Asgary’s team at ADERSIM forecasts the behaviour of existing wildfires with AI modelling, develops drone-based wildfire sensing tools for water quality assessments, and uses virtual reality to help residents make changes related to wildfire. 

“We can provide a lot of research and training capacities, especially when it comes to the use of new technologies in this area,” Asgary says. 

However, resources have been stretched to capacity across the country, burdened further by a complicated chain of command. In Canada, emergency management for any hazard is usually executed first at the municipal level. As a disaster grows, communities call on their provincial or territorial ministries for more support. 

Fire management in Canada also involves all 13 provincial and territorial wildland fire agencies. Those agencies own and operate the non-profit Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC), a collaborative body that coordinates resource sharing and mutual aid but does not function as a federal agency itself. 

Federal emergency management currently falls under the purview of Public Safety Canada and its Government Operations Centre (GOC), which focuses on preparedness and response. In the case of Jasper, the GOC provided humanitarian and logistical support for residents, and coordinated the deployment of Canadian Armed Forces heavy-lift aircraft with the team on the ground. 

There are gaps between existing agencies: CIFFC mobilizes personnel but does not hire or train firefighters, and the GOC’s activities stop short of the other two tenets of emergency management: prevention and mitigation, and recovery. 

Jurisdictional responsibility for wildfires is further complicated by fragmentation at each level of government. If a wildfire occurs on federal lands managed by the Department of National Defence or Parks Canada, those agencies coordinate the firefighting efforts, not the province.

That was the situation with the Jasper wildfires. A 2025 report commissioned by the Municipality of Jasper cited the provincial government’s interference as a slowdown to response operations. The report found the province of Alberta repeatedly requested information from the command team and attempted to make decisions, even though it had no jurisdictional authority because the town is located within a national park. 

A year prior, the National Risk Profile (NPR), a national disaster risk assessment published by Public Safety Canada, had warned that jurisdictions are not aligned in their emergency management approaches and programming. The NPR identified further challenges, including information-sharing bottlenecks between the health and emergency management systems. 

Asgary says the current system isn’t working like it used to. Even well-resourced provinces such as Ontario or B.C. have been overwhelmed in recent years, leaving little capacity to support neighbours. Without a top-down framework, Asgary says, municipalities hire consultants and end up with equipment and software incompatible with other stakeholders – a problem that only surfaces when operations scale up during a disaster. 

“The time has passed to do reactive policy making,” Asgary says. “We are now in the middle of a major climate change-related crisis. It should be clear for everyone that the current system is not sufficient.” 

The resource challenge

As a disaster unfolds, resources are often assigned based on availability rather than what is best suited for the job, Asgary says. 

“The wildfire is not going to tell us, ‘I’m going to happen now,’” he says. “These resources may be already deployed somewhere else.” 

A national reserve firefighting force is an oft-cited solution, but unlikely without a systemic change in recruitment, says McMullen, who represents fire chiefs across Canada in his role as president of the CAFC. Of Canada’s 126,000 firefighters, about 90,000 are volunteers – a pool that has shrunk by nearly 29 per cent since 2016. McMullen correlates the drop with recent wildfire seasons that have strained volunteers, who are normally called upon an average of 22 minutes a week to provide support in their local communities. 

If provinces were to increase investment in attracting and recruiting new firefighters or equipment to the pipeline, Kennedy says there would be “enough slack in the system to keep trading and sharing and providing mutual aid.” 

The provinces and territories currently own and share an aging fleet of water bombers. The federal government hasn’t committed to investing in a national fleet, but did announce $316.7 million over the next five years to contract additional aircraft from third parties for the 2026 season and beyond. Provinces, meanwhile, are moving ahead on their own: Alberta announced in February that it would invest $400 million to purchase five De Havilland Canadair 515 firefighting aircraft, with the first delivered in 2031. Manitoba is also in line to acquire three of the new water bombers, with the first to arrive by 2031.

Two paths forward: the debate

Calls for a national wildfire agency surface every year during the height of wildfire season as another potential solution to the resource problem. 

Kennedy says a wildfire agency is a “great buzzword,” but notes CIFFC is already working effectively at pooling resources between provinces and navigating equipment procurement with the federal government. 

“These 15 fire agencies have been working for decades to build trust with communities, to build relationships, to develop infrastructure and get their systems working well. Why would we want to create a 16th fire bureaucracy?” Kennedy says. “This call [acts as] a code word for, ‘We need more co-ordination,’ or, ‘we need more collaboration.’” 

He says Canada’s approach would be better served with continuous injections of funding to existing systems. He sees the Government Operations Centre as a potential springboard for building a solid operational framework for all emergencies, including wildfires. 

Asgary envisions an emergency management agency that also covers floods and earthquakes. He says the current system “is not really able to help to the level that these provinces expect, because they don’t have [the resources]” during the time of the actual emergency. 

He points to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency as an example of an agency with a wide mandate to do anything required to manage a disaster and its aftermath, including waiving bureaucratic processes and pulling resources from governmental departments. 

McMullen and the CAFC have been lobbying for more of a hybrid role in the form of a national fire commissioner or liaison, who would act as point person for all federal fire-related conversations. 

The Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) echoes Asgary’s call for a central emergency management agency so communities can avoid creating a new “playbook” after every disaster. The IBC, which oversaw $2.4 billion in insured loss claims related to weather in 2025, has called on the federal government to discuss their response to emergency management. Talks are underway: Minister of Emergency Management and Community Resilience Eleanor Olszewski led public and industry consultations through March 2026, with a report forthcoming. 

Canada remains the only G7 country without a national emergency management agency or a national fire administration.  &�Բ�����;

A future with fire

Central to whatever comes next is mitigation – the actions taken before a fire. 

“We have to accept that we will live with fire,” Kennedy says. “How do we make the landscape less attractive for that fire to spread?” 

One way is to focus on improvements to the wildland itself. Containing every fire means the forest becomes overburdened with healthy trees that act as fuel. Controlled burns can encourage regeneration of the landscape, and clearing long strips of land to form built-in firebreaks can slow the spread of wildfire. 

Another approach is to work within communities on updating building codes so new structures use fire-resistant materials – which the town of Jasper is doing – and on educating residents about wildfire-proofing measures they can make to their homes. 

Disaster response already costs the federal government about $1.8 billion a year. However, the National Risk Profile estimates a return on investment of $4 to $10 for every dollar spent on mitigation, with the highest returns related to risk assessment, hazard analysis and mitigation planning. 

Canada is nowhere near international investment benchmarks established by the European Union that suggests governments spend between 0.66 and 1.25 per cent of their GDP annually on climate adaptation, which includes fire mitigation activities. For Canada, that would fall between $21.5 and $40.7 billion. In 2026, the federal climate adaptation spend is $7.1 billion. 

Investments start and stall with shifts in government, which further complicate consistent action, and are often targeted at firefighting instead of systemic change, Kennedy says.  &�Բ�����;

“There is simply no number of firefighters that would be enough in Canada. We will never have enough air tankers. We will never have enough hoses. We will never have enough firefighters. That is a black hole of investment,” says Kennedy. “We could pour as much money into firefighting as we want, and it will never be enough, because the root causes of this are not fire suppression alone, but are ecosystem management, addressing climate change and building more resiliently.”

With files from Kristina Urquhart 

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