Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for inviting me.

My name is Mike Flannigan, and I am the British Columbia innovation research chair in predictive services, emergency management and fire science at Thompson Rivers University.

I am honoured to be joining you today.

As long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with weather and wildfires. I have had the good fortune to observe and study wildfires in my career since the late 1970s.

Most of my comments today address wildfires, but many of the concepts also apply to other hazards.

Every year, there are things about wildfire that surprise me. The 2023 exceptional fire season surprised me. It was not just the record-smashing area-burned numbers of around 18 million hectares—three times the size of Nova Scotia—which was more than double the previous modern-day record of seven million hectares in 1989. More importantly, it was about the impact of these wildfires, with lives lost directly and indirectly through wildfire smoke, homes lost and the stress and emotional toll on Canadians.

Wildfires raged from coast to coast to coast in Canada in 2023. Almost 300 communities were evacuated, with about 240,000 evacuees, and some evacuees were out of their homes and communities for weeks or more.

Even if wildfires are not on your doorstep, the smoke can travel long distances and have a major impact on quality of life, as we saw in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and the eastern seaboard of the United States, impacting over 100 million people. Insurable losses due to wildfires in 2023 are estimated at around $1 billion, which is in the top 10 in terms of Canadian disasters. Fort McMurray was number one. Expenditures on fire management activities are likely to exceed $2 billion in 2023.

The Canadian Armed Forces were called on many times to assist with wildfire disasters. The Canadian Armed Forces helped with evacuations as well as with firefighting efforts. Additionally, Canadian fire management agencies used resources from 11 other countries to assist with battling the flames.

In 2023, we did not have enough resources when there were widespread extreme fire conditions. These are the times when disasters strike.

We need to explore new approaches. In the future, the potential for more disasters will increase due to climate change bringing even more extreme fire weather and because of increased development in and near the flammable forest. We need to protect Canadians, our communities and our critical infrastructure.

How can we prevent or mitigate catastrophic wildfires? There are several options:

First, provide more funding to provinces and territories to address fire management activities. This could take the form of buying aircraft to help renew and augment an aging fleet and funding the development of resilient communities, programs like FireSmart and infrastructure, etc. The federal government has provided funding for training for wildland firefighting.

Second, create a federal emergency management agency, such as FEMA in the United States, or enhance and expand existing capacity to address emergencies before, during and after wildfire emergencies.

One approach would to be develop a quick-deploy wildfire fighting force that would work hand in glove with the existing fire management agencies. This could include a national firefighting air fleet as well as ground firefighting crews.

Instead of just copying what other countries are already doing in emergency management, we could be leaders by acting before the disaster strikes. Specifically, take preventative action. This could be done with an enhanced early warning system. This enhanced early warning system could predict when and where extreme fire weather will occur as well as where other wildfires are likely to start in the next three to seven days.

This would allow the movement of resources to those locations prior to any disaster and the ability to extinguish unwanted fires while they are still small. Small wildfires are easy to extinguish even if the wildfire conditions are extreme, but you have to attack them while they are small. This might only be for a short period of time.