Orange-hued skies, wildfire smoke and scorched forest land have been regular occurrences across North America in recent years as rising global temperatures contribute to massive forest fires. Many of those are in northern Canada, home to some of the world’s largest intact forests.
Canada currently has more active wildfires than it did at the same stage in either of the past two years, while the area burned so far this year exceeds the 10-year average.
Size, intensity of ordinary wildfires grow
Canada, the world’s second-largest country in area, has nearly a tenth of the world’s total forest area and about 24% of the world’s boreal forests. Many of them are unreachable by road and uninhabited.
Forest fires are a natural process that kill pests and clear out unhealthy shrubbery. But in recent years, the size and intensity of fires have increased.
Rising temperatures due to climate change mean drier forests. Drier forests allow fire to spread faster. Fires are often started by lightning or campfires in more populated areas.
Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, noted the area burned in Canada has almost quadrupled since the 1970s. Warmer temperatures have prolonged the wildfire season, and more lightning is also causing fires, he said.
Climate scientist Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M College of Arts and Sciences, said the Canadian fires were burning in largely unmanaged forests where, for the last one hundred years, they had been allowed to burn until they died out.
Like Flannigan, he said higher temperatures were fueling bigger, more intense blazes in Canada.
“The reason this is having a big effect on the U.S. right now is because of climate change; that’s the thing that has changed. Nothing else has changed,” he said.
As fires get bigger and more forest area is scorched, smoke follows the wind. Fires in northern and western Ontario as well as northern Minnesota brought the world’s worst air quality to Toronto earlier this week, then spread to New York and Washington. Detroit and Chicago by Friday had the world’s worst air quality.
Governments try to protect communities
While some fires are unavoidable, governments are trying to protect communities by closing forest areas to prevent human-caused fires, using non-flammable building materials in high-risk locations and being better prepared.
The federal government has allocated more money to fight wildfires, including C$316.7 million ($227 million) for aerial firefighting capacity over five years and C$47.8 million for the Parks Canada National Fire Management Program. The Ontario government spent C$271 million on emergency firefighting in 2025-26, exceeding its budget of C$135 million. It has allocated C$150 million for 2026-27.
After Canada’s biggest wildfire season by area burned in 2023, experts and politicians began calling for a national response organization. Those calls intensified after fires in 2024 engulfed a third of the tourist town of Jasper.
Canada is the only Group of Seven country without a federal agency focused on combating wildfires. Much of the firefighting responsibility falls to provinces.
In June 2026, the Canadian Senate published a report that called for a federal coordinating office for wildfires and emergency response, and proposed funding a national fleet of modern firefighting aircraft, among other measures.
“Wildfires are now a crisis,” the report said, noting the record area burnt in recent years.
The federal Office of Emergency Management and Community Resilience said it was considering recommendations on wildfire response and the possible creation of a federal emergency management agency. It cited the leasing of 10 new firefighting aircraft as an example of how it is addressing severe wildfires by bolstering provincial and territorial firefighting capacity.
Canada currently has roughly 126,000 firefighters who work for towns, villages and cities, of which about 90,000 are volunteers. Only 3,000 to 5,000 firefighters are trained to tackle wildland fires across the country, said Ken McMullen, the president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs. A centralized approach would help in coordinating, training and moving firefighters and equipment across the country when needed, McMullen said.
