Fighting wildfires should be counted as defence spending, too

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Toby A.A. Heaps is chief executive officer of sustainable-economy media and research organization Corporate Knights.

Imagine if hostile forces launched a relentless assault on Canada – setting forests ablaze and forcing hundreds of thousands of Canadians from their homes. Across the country, millions choke on acrid smoke. In just three years, this enemy has burned an area nearly half the size of Alberta, leaving behind charred landscapes and shattered communities.

That enemy is wildfires. Once part of nature’s regeneration cycle, they are now four times more destructive than they used to be, driven by hotter, drier conditions. Megafires of this scale are the new reality. While wildfires are inevitable, the scale of the damage is not. Canada’s fragmented approach has made the crisis far worse than it needs to be.

If a foreign adversary had caused this scale of disruption, we would respond with full national mobilization. Wildfires demand no less of a response. Yet despite the fact that nearly 8 per cent of Canada’s forests have burned in just three years, progress has been slowed by fragmented jurisdictions, small step increases in funding and piecemeal measures – challenges that governments and agencies have long struggled to overcome.

Meanwhile, Canadians endure record displacement: 352,000 people forced from their homes across 2023, 2024 and 2025. In 2023 alone, 98 per cent of Canadians experienced at least one day of smoke-filled air. South of the border, more than 100 million Americans were placed under air-quality alerts in 2023, and more than 80 million in 2025 – alerts driven primarily by smoke from Canadian fires.

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This is not just a domestic emergency. It is a continental one, arriving at a sensitive moment in Canada–U.S. relations. Republican lawmakers and allies of President Donald Trump are already voicing anger over the smoke from Canadian wildfires that has blanketed U.S. cities, and they are unlikely to stay quiet while tens of millions of Americans suffer through air-quality alerts made worse by Canada’s underinvestment in wildfire response.

And make no mistake: This is national defence. Canada has accelerated its NATO spending pledge to 2 per cent of GDP this year, with a new target of 5 per cent by 2035, leaving Ottawa scrambling to identify credible, capital-intensive investments to count toward the goal. Wildfire readiness fits perfectly. Firefighting aircraft, satellite surveillance and early-warning systems are dual-use assets that strengthen both domestic safety and collective defence.

Canada’s fire management agencies work tirelessly under immense pressure, but the scale and intensity of today’s fires routinely push even their best efforts to the breaking point. They need stronger national backing to match the new reality.

Ottawa has already funded programs like FireSmart, the Wildfire Resilient Futures Initiative, and the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada (WRRC). Prevention – including fuel management, prescribed burns and Indigenous-led stewardship – remains essential, but it must be paired with greater suppression capacity when fire seasons escalate beyond prevention’s reach. The reality is that Canada’s current surge capacity is insufficient when fire seasons escalate to “all hands on deck,” as they now do almost every year.

This summer, the national preparedness level was stuck at Level 5 – the highest – for virtually the entire season, with only a few days of relief. That meant every available resource was already committed. When new fires erupted, there was nothing left to send. That gap – between what we have and what we need – is the true measure of our vulnerability.

Canada’s wildfire crisis is not measured only in scorched forests and evacuations. Annual suppression costs now exceed $1-billion, and over the past five years, wildfires have caused more than an estimated $30-billion in economic damages, from destroyed homes and shuttered businesses to health impacts from smoke. A small fraction of fires – about 3 per cent – cause nearly all of the destruction. Research shows that with better surveillance, faster response and targeted prevention, damages could be reduced by as much as 78 per cent.

That is why leading national industry and environmental groups are calling for a federal investment of $4.1-billion over five years – 70 per cent of it capital – to build a dedicated aerial firefighting fleet, expand satellite and drone surveillance, and train thousands of additional firefighters to provide the surge capacity Canada now lacks. Put simply: Investing billions now could prevent tens of billions in losses later, while sparing Canadians the worst human and health impacts.

Despite dedicated efforts, our current system is stretched to its limits year after year. Canada is on fire. We need a firefighting surge capacity – funded, trained and ready to deploy because our current system is being stretched beyond capacity. The question is no longer whether we can afford it. The question is whether we can afford not to.

Let’s not wait until we can no longer see the forest because the trees are all gone.