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Originally Posted by saucylito
I'm surprised that since it's in a National Park that the federal government didn't support bring in firefighting crews earlier on to preserve at least the village like the American government did in Yellowstone. I'm guessing that Alberta maybe runs the National Parks up there, which is a large area of National Parks for a province even like Alberta to cover.
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There is no national civil defence organization in Canada like FEMA.
Historically, Canada has never had the frequency or scale of natural disasters as experienced in the US. This however is changing. The climate is warming, and summertime drought is more common. Forest fires are both more common and more aggressive than they used to be. The Atlantic is warming, and, as a consequence, hurricanes in Atlantic Canada are now nearly an annual event. Earthquakes remain uncommon, but, Vancouver Island and the lower mainland of BC are in the target hairs of a long overdue megathrust quake. There are Canadian volcanoes. Add in some blizzards and ice storms, and, I think a FEMA like organization is long overdue.
At present, civil defence is a provincial responsibility, but, with a large enough disaster, an individual province can easily get overwhelmed. There is a longstanding tradition of provinces helping each other out, but this is informal and voluntary. Provinces can ask for federal aid too, but, this usually just means the feds sending a few hundred soldiers to help with the clean up.
We can do better.
We need a national organization with skilled professionals to coordinate and oversee the response. There needs to be a national repository of equipment and supplies to support the response. We need a federal fleet of waterbombing aircraft and a professional corp of wildland firefighter. I would much prefer to see the feds do something like this rather than yet another new virtue signalling activist social program.
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I believe that it is necessary for all governments in the world to prepare (and coordinate) long-term plans to fight fires. I fear that these fires are often caused voluntarily by humans and that they are aided by increasingly higher temperatures and increasingly longer periods of drought.
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