A wildfire started by a lightning strike about 12 kilometres away reached the town of Jasper in only 48 hours.
The fire, driven by hot temperatures, dry conditions, and high winds, roared into town with a 100-metre-high wall of flame that couldn’t be stopped.
Pierre Martel, Director of National Fire Management for Parks Canada, called it a “monster.”
But as fast as the fire hit town, it was a mere ember compared to the firestorm that followed on social media.
Almost immediately, the blaming and shaming began.
Some blamed Premier Danielle Smith for lacking provincial wildland fire resources, and others blamed Trudeau and the Feds for not dealing with thousands of hectares of incendiary beetle-killed pines in Jasper National Park.
Still, others went straight to conspiracy theories that the fire was an act of “eco-terrorism” to help spread climate hysteria.
Pick your favourite scapegoat, and you’ll find information to support blaming them. But the one thing that unites all the blame is misinformation and denial.
The hard truth is that Jasper is a symptom of a more significant societal problem, and not one person, or group is to blame—we all are.
The Fantasy of “They”
First, we can easily dispense of the most far-fetched blame claims.
Martyupnorth on X, a self-proclaimed “applied scientist,” “unacceptable fact checker,” and “real environmentalist,” lists towns that were burned as part of an organized plan by… “they.”
Although “they” was never defined in his post, based on the hundreds of comments that followed, the “they” were Trudeau, the Liberals, and the “Wokeism” movement.
In 2001, they tried to alarm us with a climate scam and burned down 10 homes in Chisolm, Alberta.
We didn’t comply.
In 2013, they decided to go big and burned down a quarter of Slave Lake.
We still didn’t comply.
So, in 2015, they attacked Fort McMurray.
Still not complying.
Last year, they started fires near Edson, Drayton Valley, Grande Prairie, Fox Creek, and we still didn’t comply.
This year, they’re going after the Crown Jewel of Alberta…. Jasper.
How much are you willing to bet that next year is Banff’s turn?
His post has drawn nearly 160K views, 400 comments, 3,200 likes, and 1,000 shares.
Of course, no data was provided to back up these claims, and anyone with a different opinion was immediately blocked as a ‘troll’ so only supporting voices show up in the comments.
Nothing was ever mentioned about what it is that “they” want us to “comply” with.
Martyupnorth is giving Trudeau and his bureaucrats some serious organizational cred and almost heroic superpowers to undertake such a devious master plan.
(Cue Dr. Evil here).
If they had such superpowers, you’d think Trudeau and his Liberals would use them to reverse their plunging decline in the polls.
Less Far-Fetched by Still Not Accurate
People on the right blame the federal government for not clearing the hectares of pine trees killed by bark beetles, which have died and become a fire hazard.
On the other hand, those on the left criticize the UCP for cutting firefighter funding and Premier Danielle Smith for prioritizing fossil fuels over renewable energy, which they believe contributed to the fires that devastated Jasper.
The reality is that Canada’s forests have become tinderboxes due to a century of fire suppression, poor land management, and inadequate climate action, which has led to a warming climate.
This issue goes beyond the responsibility of any single government, whether federal or provincial.
Over the last 100 years, seven Conservative Prime Ministers and 11 Liberal Prime Ministers supported fire suppression. Here at home, 12 conservative-leaning and one NDP Premier promoted policies that made Jasper vulnerable.
That’s a lot of blame to go around.
The fact is, Jasper was among the most prepared for wildfires among all Canadian communities.
The town had implemented extensive fire prevention measures, including removing beetle-killed trees and fire-smarting within 500 meters of infrastructure. These efforts have been ongoing since the late 1990s and have been supported with Federal funds, whether under federal Conservative or Liberal rule.
According to Ron Hallman, President and CEO of Parks Canada, even with all the preparation, nothing short of bulldozing thousands of hectares of the park to remove all beetle-killed trees could have prevented the perfect storm of dry, hot, and windy conditions that fueled the Jasper Wildfire.
Even then, many experts think that the beetle-killed trees were not a significant factor in the fire.
As for blaming Premier Smith, while Jasper is in Alberta, the town and national park fall under the jurisdiction of the Municipality of Jasper and Parks Canada. Whether Smith increased or decreased funding for firefighters wouldn’t have made a difference in this case. In the past, both the UCP and NDP governments have reduced the provincial firefighting budget, but under Premier Smith, the Alberta firefighting budget has actually increased during the current fiscal year.
If You Want to Blame, Look in the Mirror
When tragedy strikes, we often resort to blame to try to make sense of the devastating events.
After all, how can things go wrong in our ordered and structured society?
Someone must have screwed up.
And, as always, things are more complicated than they seem and yet also simpler.
The cause of Jasper’s fire?
Simple. Lightning.
But how did the fire turn into a raging monster? Complicated.
But monster fires like Jasper’s have also occurred in Slave Lake and Fort MacMurray and are becoming more frequent (e.g., Lytton, BC, and Lahaina, Hawaii) as our planet’s temperature increases.
People have had such great impacts on the world’s climate it is hard even to comprehend.
But as writer Andrew Nikiforuk explained it in a recent Tyee article:
[Our] species found a remarkable energy source: fossil fuels. Then, one billion humans gorged on the resource to become eight billion people served by 500 billion mechanical energy slaves — the devices, from cars to cranes to cookers, that serve us. The pollution from these slaves has now melted ice, acidified oceans, dried forests, roasted the climate and contaminated the world with forever chemicals. Yet the magnitude of our destruction escapes us.
According to the laws of thermodynamics, for our climate to stay in balance, the amount of energy entering the atmosphere annually should equal the amount of energy coming in from the sun.
But by burning fossil fuel, we are releasing ‘fossilized’ sun energy that took millions of years to create back into the atmosphere in a very short time span.
As a result, more energy is entering our planet’s atmosphere than is leaving, resulting in an increasingly warming planet.
Currently, the excess energy trapped because of the heat-trapping pollution we produce equals the force of 800,000 Hiroshima bombs every day!
As Nikiforek summarized, “To understand the calamity of Jasper and more Jaspers to come, it is important to close your eyes and imagine the explosion of five atomic bombs per second.”
So we continue daily, happily consuming fossilized energy complaining online about who to blame for which disaster.
As humans, we seem more interested in polarized debates on social media than in facing the elephant in the room and working together to prevent that overheated pachyderm from trashing our home.
We have become paralyzed by polarization.
How many more Jasper’s need to happen before we move on to the true problem facing us?
