More than 400 active wildfires were burning across Canada as of Tuesday night. according to the authoritieswhich exacerbated a wildfire season that forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people, sparked a sense of concern across the vast country and prompted air quality alerts hundreds of miles south in the United States.
The threat of wildfires, which has stretched from British Columbia on the west coast to Nova Scotia nearly 2,900 miles away in the east in recent weeks, was brought to the political heart of the nation on Tuesday. A dense haze hovered over Parliament Hill and the towering neo-Gothic building that houses the Parliament of Canada in Ottawa. The sun was obscured by smoke, the sky an apocalyptic shade of orange.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said hundreds of soldiers were deployed across the country to help fight the fire. “This is a scary time for a lot of people,” Trudeau said said earlier this weeknoting that many Canadians who had to be evacuated in recent days had just a few hours to pack before fleeing their homes.
Bill Blair, the Secretary of Emergency Preparedness, told reporters last week that as of May, an area of about 2.7 million hectares, or about 6.7 million acres, of forest in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick , Ontario and the Northwest Territories were burned. “The equivalent of over 5 million soccer fields has burned in Canada so far this year.” he wrote on Twitter.
In a country known for its scenic landscapes and orderliness, runaway wildfires have fueled unrest and highlighted the dangers of global warming. Scientific research suggests that heat and drought related to climate change are the main reasons behind the increase in larger and more violent fires in the country.
The fires have also underscored the bond between Canada and its southern neighbor, as smoke from eastern Canada’s hundreds of wildfires casts a hazy veil over New York City and pollutes air quality from Minnesota to Massachusetts.
All complacency ended on Tuesday in eastern Canadian cities like Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, home to the majority of the country’s population, which until now has been largely immune to wildfires in far-flung provinces. According to local authorities, Ottawa was among the places in Ontario with the highest health risk due to poor air quality.
Plumes of smoke also hung over Toronto, the nation’s financial capital, on Tuesday night, and schools announced that students would be taking their breaks indoors on Wednesday. During the day, parts of the city were filled with a pungent odor as many residents avoided going outside.
“With smoke levels predicted from wildfires, is it time for Toronto to reintroduce masks?” asked The Toronto Starwhich brings back bad memories of pandemic times.
As there were more than 160 active wildfires in Quebec on Tuesday, some Montreal residents closed their windows. Smog hung over parts of the city and health officials advised residents in Laval, a city north of Montreal, to wear N95 masks.
The wildfires also affected businesses, including many mining companies Cease of operations in Quebec.
Katrina Eyk, a senior meteorologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, the department that coordinates environmental policy, said winds pushed plumes of smoke from Quebec wildfires across southern Ontario, impacting air quality and visibility. Canadian health officials have warned the smoke can cause symptoms ranging from sore and watery eyes to coughing, dizziness, chest pain and palpitations.
“It’s still pretty gross out there,” Ms Eyk said Tuesday night from Toronto. “But on Thursday it looks like the cloud could be moving directly over the greater Toronto area with the overall NE shifting wind and make for pretty bad conditions.”
The wildfires are already shaking British Columbia and Alberta, an oil and gas-producing province where residents of the largest city, Calgary, have settled down for breakfast in recent weeks as acrid smoke seeped in from the cracks under their front doors.
On the east coast of Canada, in Halifax, Nova ScotiaLate last month, a forest fire forced the evacuation of more than 16,000 people.
Michael Mehta, an environmental social scientist and professor at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, said the visceral reality of smoke hanging over major cities could spark renewed debate about the risks of climate change.
So far, he said, many people on the East Coast have not had firsthand exposure to the health risks of air pollution from wildfires that have ravaged western provinces in recent years. “There is essentially a discrepancy,” he said. “You didn’t have that experience.”
