Matthew Lau: Government-funded wildfire ‘facts’ contradict reality

With wildfire smoke wafting into many communities including Toronto, many wonder why this is happening and what can be done to prevent it. The Canadian Climate Institute, an organization funded to the tune of $34.9 million by the federal government over the past four years, recently published a series of “fact sheets” about how climate change is making heat waves, flooding, droughts and wildfires worse. According to the institute, climate change threatens the safety, wellbeing and prosperity of Canadians, and governments must take drastic action to curtail its effects including by “accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels to limit climate heating.”

However, while wildfire smoke, floods and other disasters are real, these fact sheets (again, paid for by the federal government) are much more alarmist than informative. For example, the institute highlights the horrific blaze in Jasper in 2024 and suggests that reduced fossil fuel usage could mitigate the harms of such fires. But in reality, the evidence shows government mismanagement — not man-made climate change — was largely to blame.

The federal government is responsible for Jasper National Park’s forest management, which includes managing the stock of timber especially in high-risk zones, either by harvesting it or removing it through smaller controlled burns. In Jasper, the government simply did not manage this effectively, despite being warned of dangerous levels of timber piling up in Jasper for years. Moreover, notwithstanding severe wildfires in the past few summers in Canada, worldwide the amount of burned area per year has declined steadily since 1900 — a key fact missing from the institute’s wildfire fact sheet.

Meanwhile, its heat waves fact sheet points to more risk of cardiovascular events, respiratory conditions, kidney conditions, mental health impacts and deaths due to global warming. However, it neglects to mention that in Canada, the number of annual deaths caused by cold is about 12 times higher than the number of annual deaths caused by heat. Higher average temperatures save more lives by reducing deaths from cold than they cause by increasing deaths from heat. And this is not just in Canada — worldwide, deaths from cold are much more common that deaths from heat.

The institute also warns on its wildfire fact sheet that global warming results in “less summer rain in some regions” but its flooding fact sheet warns that “because of climate change, most regions in the country will experience increased rainfall.” So apparently, climate change causes either less rain or more rain, and both are bad. A reasonable person might wonder whether these fact sheets accurately assess climate change impacts or if they are instead simply meant to scare the public.

Other points made in the fact sheets make climate change sound severe, but in reality have little meaningful implication. For example, the drought fact sheet says that in 2025, parts of the Maritimes experienced their driest summer on record. Indeed, according to the federal government Amherst, Truro and Greenwood, Nova Scotia, and Summerside, Prince Edward Island, had their driest July-to-September on record. The CBC reported they experienced a “once-in-50-year” drought.

But is it really a big deal that four communities that combine for about 0.1 per cent of Canada’s total population experienced an event that’s expected to occur every 50 years? A much more relevant fact (which is missing from the institute’s fact sheets) is that worldwide there has been no significant increase in droughts since 1900, perhaps with the exception of some small regions in Africa and South America.

Finally, the institute warns Canada is warming twice the rate of the global average and references a report saying that from 1948 to 2016 the average annual temperature in Canada increased 1.7 degrees Celsius. So what? As economist Ross McKitrick points out, “Pretty much any large country warmed faster than the global average, because countries are on land. Oceans cover 70 per cent of the Earth, and the way the system works, during a warming trend the land warms faster than the oceans. So the scary headline only confirms that we are on land.”

Importantly, back in 1948, the life expectancy at birth for a Canadian was about 67 or 68. Today it is 82. Despite recent challenges, per-person GDP (an indicator of living standards) in Canada has approximately tripled since 1960. Therefore, the “extra” 0.8 or 0.9 degrees of warming in Canada since 1948 clearly has not produced disastrous results.

Wildfires and wildfire smoke are real problems that should be understood and mitigated. But the reality about climate change is not nearly as alarming as what the government-funded Canadian Climate Institute reports.

National Post

Matthew Lau is an adjunct scholar with the Fraser Institute.