We didn’t think it could happen here: that seemed to be the thought on everyone’s mind when Jasper went up in flames.
Western Canada has seen increasingly destructive wildfires in recent years, which has put small, previously unknown communities on the map in a tragic way: Fort McMurray, Lytton, and Slave Lake are now infamous for their wildfires. But on July 22, the Jasper wildfire set a new precedent. Jasper National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site which draws in about 2 million visitors a year to see its mountains, glaciers, and waterfalls.The town itself draws tens of thousands. Now, a great chunk of it is nothing but ash and smoking rubble.
The wildfire was incredibly powerful, advancing on the town at five kilometres in an hour and destroying one third of its structures: mostly residential buildings like houses, apartments and senior residences. The town’s roughly-5,000 residents have no idea when they will be able to come home, or when there will be anything to come home to. Firefighters are expected to be putting out flames for three more months at least. As of Aug. 1, it is still burning out of control north of the town.
A few days after the town was ravaged, Conservative Premier Danielle Smith held a press conference where she waxed lyrical about the “magic of Jasper” in between suppressed sobs. She didn’t spare a single word for the other, mostly Indigenous, communities evacuated at the same time: Little Red River Cree Nation, Chipewyan Lake, and Bighorn. For many of Little Red River Cree Nation, this marks the second year in a row they had to flee from wildfires. But nonetheless, her “emotional reaction” to the Jasper fire made the rounds in the media as proof that this tragedy has truly touched her, just like it’s touched everyone else.
We’re all grieving this loss together, journalists argue. But we’re not all in it together. There are those who have aided in the destruction of the earth, literally preparing the ground for fires like this; and those who have lost their homes, livelihoods, and beloved places because of it. Danielle Smith is one of the former. She has no right to cry about the fire.
What did you expect?
Smith is an ex-oil lobbyist turned politician, which is to say, an oil lobbyist with access to the levers of state power. She’s used her time in office to funnel money to oil barons with the “Rstar” project, push through a moratorium on renewable energy development, and sow climate change denialism. Last year, she led the charge on the harebrained conspiracy that Canada’s historic wildfire crisis was actually started by arsonists and had nothing to do with climate change.
So we have to ask: after spending her whole career lying and swindling to fund the oil barons’ destruction of the environment, and then propagandizing to cover up for them, what did Smith think would happen?
Just days before the Jasper fire broke out (and while the aforementioned Northern Alberta communities were under evacuation), Smith was on Jordan Peterson’s podcast praising oil and gas, attacking the “radical left” for wanting to end climate change.
If she wants to cry about Jasper, she should go cry over the flames.
Now is the time of monsters
Unsurprisingly, Danielle Smith still has not mentioned the role of climate change in the Jasper wildfire—a criminal suppression of the truth given just how colossal and alarming that role is.
The Jasper fire was a “monster,” as one fire management official put it. It travelled five kilometres in an hour, pushed along by 100 kilometre an hour winds and powerfully fuelled by a forest parched by drought and a three-week long heatwave. These factors converged to create a fire so intense that it generated its own weather system, called a pyrocumulonimbus. This generates lightning strikes and downdrafts that feed the storm even further in a vicious cycle. At the same time, the fire was shooting embers and burning pine cones as far as two kilometres ahead of itself.
At that point, as the same official puts it, “there are no tools we have in our toolbox to deal with it […] you get out of the way, you retreat and you do what you can to protect communities and infrastructure as best as you can.” Water bucketing didn’t work, water bombers couldn’t fly near it, and at some points heavy equipment operators couldn’t build fire breaks before having to flee for safety.
Fires this powerful used to be a very rare occurrence in Canada, but they’re becoming more common due to that critical convergence of conditions—heat, dryness, and wind—that climate change is making more common and extreme. In an eerily perfect coincidence, the day that the fire reached Jasper, Earth broke the record for highest global temperature.
We are in a new era of monstrous wildfires, ones which defy our current capacity to control them. So long as the climate crisis continues to advance, we will find ourselves saying time and time again: I didn’t think it could happen here. But Danielle Smith won’t admit it, and she certainly won’t do anything about it.
On her weekly radio show, she discussed the idea of having Alberta take over responsibility for Jasper from Parks Canada (taking an opportunity to get in a jab at the feds), and floated the idea of getting logging companies to log certain areas to make fire breaks and then allowing ranchers to graze their cattle there. This would be a gift to commercial logging and ranching more than a serious forest management strategy.
Ninety-three per cent of logging companies in Canada clearcut, and as we have discussed elsewhere, this can actually increase risk of wildfires if underbrush and other materials are left on the ground to dry out. Not all of this is grass or foliage, so cows wouldn’t eliminate that problem. But even if the fire break somehow worked perfectly, it wouldn’t have stopped the Jasper wildfire. It was able to leap fire breaks easily.
Even the relatively substantial increase to the wildfire fighting budget Smith put through is too little, too late. This increase comes after years of budget cuts going back to 2019, by both the New Democratic Party and the United Conservative Party.
And most importantly, all the funding and strategy in the world won’t be enough if fossil fuel production isn’t curbed and green energy massively expanded. We will see new mutations of monster fires, and new levels of tragedy. That’s the future Smith is steering us toward, and she’s determined to divert our attention from that reality.
We’re not in it together
Danielle Smith has no right to cry over the lost “magic” of Jasper. She looks at a mountain range and sees an opportunity for open pit mining, a forest and sees clearcuts, a stretch of prairie and sees bitumen. The destruction of Jasper was the inevitable consequence of the destruction she helps the oil barons commit every day.
Despite Smith’s weepy promise that we will “rally together,” working class people have been hit the hardest, like always. Thousands have already begun filing insurance claims and will have to spend agonizing months or even years navigating the bureaucratic process, which will be devastating for anyone without substantial savings. In the meanwhile, Danielle Smith has allotted each adult a pitiful one-time payment of $1,250, and $500 per child.
Under the capitalist climate crisis we can look forward to the constant erosion of stability and the constant looming of disaster. Meanwhile, the capitalist class will be hidden away in air conditioned offices, occasionally feigning grief at the disasters they themselves prepared.
The climate crisis is a class war, but right now, it’s a one-sided one. We need to change that. The stakes for revolution have never been higher. We have not only a world to win, but a world to save.
