When Danielle Smith, premier of Alberta, began her grim update about the wildfire damage to Jasper, the famed mountain resort in the Canadian Rockies, her voice slipped and she held back tears.
Hours earlier, a fast-moving wildfire tore through the community, incinerating homes, businesses and historic buildings. She praised the “true heroism” of fire crews who had rushed in to save Jasper, only to be pulled back when confronted by a 400ft wall of flames. She spoke about the profound meaning and “magic” of the national park.
Her emotional response was shared widely online but failed to reflect her previous comments on wildfires – and her government’s relentless fight against federal policies to combat global heating, which evidence suggest has made the blazes larger and more intense.
Alberta is no stranger to wildfires, fighting thousands of blazes each summer. The biggest fire ever measured in North America broke out in Alberta in 1950.
But last summer, during a record-breaking wildfire season which scorched more than 18m hectares of land in Canada, Smith was asked about her government’s fierce opposition to federal emission reduction plans and the link between worsening fire seasons and climate change.
“It’s a real-life metaphor … happening in front of us with a historic wildfire season,” Ryan Jespersen said to Smith on an episode of his podcast, Real Talk. “Every expert that we talk to indicates the significant factor that climate change is playing on our susceptibility to wildfire and on the conditions that lead to these massive blazes that are happening earlier and earlier in the season.”
Smith responded by referring to conspiracy theories that the record-breaking fire season was the result of arson or government intervention- not climate change.
“I think you’re watching, as I am, the number of stories about arson,” she told him. “I’m very concerned that there are arsonists.”
Despite her comments, provincial fire agencies across Canada – including in Alberta – say that nearly all of the country’s major wildfires were caused by lightning striking the tinder-like condition of forests.
Last year, Smith trimmed funding to the province’s wildfire response unit. The premier said it would allow for a “more nimble” force to respond quickly to fires, but critics pointed out her decision followed a string of cuts by the United Conservative Party, including scrapping Alberta’s elite aerial fire service team and cutting the number of fire watch towers. The leftwing New Democratic party also cut funding for wildfire services, but cuts under the governing UCP have been deeper.
Smith has spent her tenure as premier casting herself as Ottawa’s greatest foe, focusing her efforts on opposition to Canada’s federal carbon tax, which she argues hurt ordinary Albertans, as well as a nationwide plan to decarbonize the electrical grid.
Experts have increasingly warned that climate change will increase the severity of wildfires in the coming years. In Canada, the Boreal forests have historically been a damp biome full of bogs, creeks and swamps. But a climate trending towards warmer, drier summers means many of those wet areas have dried up, leaving a tinder-like ecosystem. Recent research also suggests the oil industry, which dominates Alberta’s economy, has contributed to the more damaging fire season.
Residents of Alberta had a glimpse of those effects in 2016, when a wildfire, dubbed the Beast, obliterated much of the infrastructure in Fort McMurray, centre of the provinces tar-sands industry, causing more than $9bn in damages.
“Officials based their response on prior experience. But no one could quite believe how fast that fire moved,” author John Vaillant, whose book Fire Weather chronicles the shifting nature of wildfires, said. “And what climate change is promising us and showing us over and over again are things we’ve never seen before.”