While U.S. President Donald Trump threatens tariffs over wildfire smoke drifting south, Canadian fire experts say large forest fires are inevitable.
Over the past week, Trump has criticized Canadian fire management and said the country is “poisoning” U.S. air. He suggested Canada might have to pay.
But experts say Canada’s worsening fire seasons reflect a harder reality: not every blaze, or the smoke that comes from it, can be stopped.
“Saying that you would need to extinguish very huge fires like this is similar to trying to stop a hurricane,” said Martin Girardin, a forest ecology researcher with Natural Resources Canada’s Canadian Forest Service. “It’s just unstoppable.”
As of Monday, more than 900 fires were burning across Canada and more than 3.7 million hectares had burned in 2026, according to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System dashboard. Fires have caused extensive damage in Namaygoosisagagun and Whitewater Lake First Nations in northwestern Ontario, and have forced evacuations in many other communities.
Girardin said climate change is helping drive worse fire seasons by bringing warmer temperatures and drier conditions, while many forests also have a buildup of fuel, including mature trees and other biomass.
Trump again vows to impose tariffs on Canada because of wildfire smoke
Mathew Conte, fire chief of Jasper, Alta., said fires are becoming more intense and moving faster as rural communities expand.
“As we kind of develop more into the forest, obviously these communities and properties are going to be more impacted by forest fires,” said Conte.
Across Canada, researchers, fire professionals and Indigenous fire stewards are emphasizing FireSmart practices to protect homes, fireguards to protect towns and cultural burning to restore the land.
Ryan Moreside, wildfire mitigation program co-ordinator for FireSmart BC, said more attention needs to shift from fighting fires to helping communities prepare before they arrive.
“It’s doing our best with what we have, and ultimately, Mother Nature sort of dictates what’s going to happen,” said Moreside.
FireSmart, a wildfire resilience framework founded in 1993, has programs in each province and territory. It promotes practices such as safe firewood storage and the use of fire-resistant building materials and home assessments.
In 2024, about 30 per cent of Jasper burned in a wildfire. Conte said one key lesson was the importance of making homes and neighbourhoods more resilient. The area that burned contained many homes close to coniferous vegetation, built tightly together and with combustible roofs, he said.
“In a situation like we had, if you are doing a really good job at FireSmarting your property, but your neighbour’s not, generally it’s not going to help,” he said. “Your neighbourhood’s only as strong as your weakest link.”
In rebuilding, Conte said Jasper is focusing on public education, stronger protection for critical infrastructure and tools such as sprinkler systems.
Fireguards, or fuel breaks, are areas around the outside of a community where trees and other vegetation are cleared or reduced through logging or prescribed burns.
Whitehorse has been working on a fireguard since 2020, while the Forest Resource Improvement Association of Alberta launched a community fireguard program in 2023.
The Bow Valley Community Fireguard, funded by the Alberta association, is being built outside of Canmore, Alta., near Banff National Park. Canmore fire chief Shawn Polley said the fireguard is about halfway complete.
How Canmore is trying to avoid Jasper’s wildfire fate
Polley said fireguards help remove fuel, create safer areas for firefighters and impede fires.
“Wildfires will happen, but what it does is allows us to have less dense or mature forests available for burning, so it can slow down a fire,” he said.
Fireguards are not meant to stop wildfires altogether, but to reduce the intensity of a fire as it approaches a community and give crews a safer place to work.
Amy Cardinal Christianson, director of fire stewardship for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, said Indigenous involvement in fire management is important for helping communities and ecosystems live with and recover from fire.
Cultural burning, in which Indigenous peoples intentionally put fire on the landscape, reflects long-standing knowledge and practice. A side benefit, Christianson said, is removing old vegetation and reducing fire risk.
“A lot of the burning that we would do was around communities or around places that we valued,” she said.
She said interest in cultural burns has grown since B.C.’s record fire seasons in 2017 and 2018, but long-term funding for stewardship programs remains limited.
Christianson said FireSmart homes and fireguards require a long-term plan to tend the land.
“We need to start looking at this much larger and much more holistically from a landscape perspective and recognizing that vegetation will grow back,” she said.
She highlighted fire stewardship in the Yunesit’in First Nation, which works with the Gathering Voices Society at the University of British Columbia and has done cultural burns each April and October since 2019.
While these efforts can help reduce damage and protect lives, experts say they cannot eliminate the risk entirely — especially as climate change makes fire seasons more intense. Ultimately, for researchers like Girardin, the key is reversing the trend of climate change.
“The only thing we have the power to control is our CO2 emissions, and we just don’t do it. Not enough anyway,” said Girardin.
