Canada’s aerial firefighting system is too slow, and front-line communities are paying the cost

A CL415 water bomber performs at the Aero Gatineau Ottawa airshow in Gatineau in September, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Patrick Doyle Canada’s aerial firefighting system is too slow, and front‑line communities are paying the cost Published: July 22, 2026 11.06am EDT Share article Print article Recently, as hundreds of fires burned across Northern Ontario and smoke pushed Toronto’s air quality to among the worst on the planet, Canada’s minister of emergency management defended Ottawa’s response and said, in effect, that nothing went wrong. In the same news cycle, Ontario’s minister of emergency preparedness sent a letter asking the federal government to guarantee that aircraft and crews could be deployed on less than 24 hours’ notice. However, a request for pre-agreed 24-hour readiness is, by definition, evidence that such readiness does not currently exist. You don’t ask for something you already have. In early June, I wrote in The Conversation Canada that Canada’s decision to lease a fleet of 10 firefighting aircraft for the 2026 wildfire season was a useful beginning but not yet a strategy. The aircraft were real; the doctrine to deploy them was not. The season has now run that experiment for us, and the results are in. As of July 22, there are just over 900 active wildfires across Canada, with around 90 of them out of control, according to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System. More than three million hectares have already burned — the product of a season with more fires than at the same point last year, and now above the long-term average, even though total area burned still trails the extreme 2025 and 2023 seasons. On July 9, the national total stood at 1.4 million hectares; roughly 1.5 million more have burned in the days since. Federal forecasts still describe the season as near the five-year average, but that average now carries the weight of 2023 and 2025, two of the worst fire years on record, so “near average” is no longer the reassurance it once was. The federally funded surge fleet is not pre-positioned in any operational sense — it must be requested by provinces. Provincial agencies apply for the aircraft through the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre’s resource-request process, and they file that request when they’re already losing ground to wildfires. A timing failure Aerial suppression is most effective in the first hours of a fire, when a small ignition can still be stopped before it becomes a massive wildfire. A…