ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½

There were 561 fires burning as of Friday morning, including 69 that were considered out of control. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre says almost 3,300 fires have been recorded this year so far.

The record was set in 2023, when more than 6,000 fires burned more than 150,000 square km of land — an area larger than all three Maritime provinces put together.

That devastating season, where wildfires raged from Newfoundland to B.C. for months on end, sparked significant public pressure for the federal government to create a new kind of disaster response agency. 

Former emergency management ministers Bill Blair and Harjit Sajjan both mulled the idea of such an agency during their time in office, with both ministers acknowledging the strain natural disasters have put on the Canadian Armed Forces and the provinces and territories. 

The government said it was looking to the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency and Australia’s National Emergency Management Agency as potential examples.

Final decisions on that front still have not been made.

During a Friday afternoon briefing with several of her cabinet colleagues, Emergency Management Minister Eleanor Olszewski said her department will be making changes to how it responds to wildfire seasons, which are becoming longer and more severe.

“We think that the formation of such an agency could have a very positive impact on our ability to co-ordinate how we respond to national disasters across the country,” Olszewski said. 

That could mean having regional water bombers to respond more quickly to fires in areas that have fewer resources, she said, or leaning on a “humanitarian task force” to ensure people can be deployed where they’re needed.

Matthew Godsoe, a senior director of the government operations centre at Public Safety Canada, said natural disasters are outpacing the capacity of the country’s emergency management system. 

“In that current context, maintaining the status quo is equivalent to doing less,” he told reporters at a technical briefing Friday, adding that all levels of government and individual Canadians must work together “to slow or stop this nearly exponential growth in disaster losses that we’re experiencing as a country.”

The federal government has been called in to provide help five times this wildfire season, including last week, when the Armed Forces and the Red Cross helped to evacuate more than 2,800 people from Garden Hill First Nation in Manitoba. 

Olszewski said she expects to have an update on a federal emergency agency in the fall.

In the meantime, communities in high-risk areas are bracing for things to get worse in the next two months, which are typically the most active months of the fire season. 

Saskatchewan has already seen one of the worst fire seasons ever in terms of the total area burned, and a record number of people have been forced out of their homes in that province.

Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty said 39,000 people have been forced to evacuate from 66 First Nations, mostly on the Prairies, calling the fire season unprecedented. 

“It is, I hope, not the new reality that we have to live with, but I’m asking myself what this looks like,” she said. 

Gull-Masty said the government’s goal at the end of the wildfire season is to “come together, debrief, reflect, and put tools in place for the next possible time that this occurs.”

Officials said the fire risk typically rises throughout August as temperatures get hotter, and they are predicting higher than normal temperatures for most of the country next month. 

“This is consistent with climate change projections, which show that the next five years will be warmer than (we) are used to,” said Sébastien Chouinard, the director of operations at the Canadian Meteorological Centre.

August is also slated to bring below-normal rainfall levels for the Prairies, B.C. and the Maritimes.

More than 530 firefighters from Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Mexico and the U.S. are in Canada to help. 

Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said his department is setting aside $11.7 million over four years to create the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada, an agency he said will “connect domestic, international governments, the private sector, wildfire scientists and experts and affected communities to share knowledge, science and technology so we can fight fires better.” 

The consortium is part of Canada’s commitment to a wildfire co-operation charter that was signed at the G7 leaders’ summit in Kananaskis, Alta., this summer. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 18, 2025.