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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
Why is Montreal’s snow-fighting army so famous?
In an average year, Montreal clears 12-million cubic metres of powder – enough snow to fill the city’s Olympic Stadium 10 times over. The snow removal, or déneigement, takes about 2,500 vehicles and 3,000 workers, and is one of the most impressive such efforts in the world.
On extremely snowy days, like the ones we saw across the country recently, the speed and scale of the operation is the envy of other Canadian cities. And a quiet point of pride.
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- World: In Mongolia, long known as the Land of the Blue Sky, air pollution has reached a crisis point
- Tariffs: Global salmon farmer Grieg Seafood swimming away from Canada
- Immigration: Climate change may mean migrants can’t be returned to hard-hit regions: internal IRCC document
- Policy: Former Alberta energy minister must appear for questioning in coal case, court rules
- Innovation: On the outskirts of Toronto, a new model for cities, nature and agriculture takes root
- Analysis from The Narwhal: How the Greenbelt scandal is quietly shaping Ontario’s 2025 provincial election
A deeper dive
Matty Captan uses a tiger torch to burn woody debris during a wildfire fuel mitigation project in the mountains above Lee Creek, B.C. on Dec. 17, 2024.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
B.C.’s work to make forests more wildfire-proof is years behind
For this week’s deeper dive, we take a closer look at Jesse Winter’s reporting and photography on the mitigation efforts to keep future fires from burning unchecked in British Columbia.
Although winter may seem like an odd time of year to be fighting wildfires, that’s essentially what Matty Captan is doing.
It’s late December in the mountain forest outside Lee Creek, in British Columbia’s North Shuswap. He’s placing a propane torch into a pile of snow-soaked branches trying to get them to burn as part of wildfire fuel mitigation project.
Nearly 100 years of aggressively suppressing wildfires and outlawing Indigenous cultural burns has left many Western Canadian forests unnaturally loaded with vegetation that, under the right conditions, becomes fuel for fires. This type of work takes many different forms, and while the results won’t stop a fire in its tracks, they can significantly improve the chances that more structures in its path will survive the blaze.
Climate change makes it even harder to prevent such fires. Years-long droughts and hotter days makes it so that when fuel-loaded areas catch light, they burn for longer and with much higher intensity.
A mapping app shows the work area on a wildfire fuel mitigation project.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
Fuel mitigation work requires careful planning. A unique prescription is written for each plot of land to be treated. It’s typically done in the late fall and early spring, when cool temperatures and high humidity make the chances of an accidental wildfire very low. Hundreds of thousands of hectares across the province could need this type of treatment.
The project Captan is working on outside Lee Creek, for Paxton Ridge Contracting, covers only 60 hectares – less than one square kilometre.
Last winter, the team mechanically thinned the forest by chopping down some of the trees. This winter they’re focused on “limbing” the ones remaining, cutting off their lower branches and removing swaths of understory shrubs and smaller plants, either burning or wood-chipping the leftovers. It’s expected to take about two years from start to finish.
Wildfire ecologist Bob Gray, who works in B.C., said he looks to Indigenous communities across western North America and their efforts to bring back both prescribed and cultural fires to their landscapes. “How do you live in a landscape full of chaparral? Well, Indigenous people did for about 15,000 years, and they found a way,” he said.
See all of Jesse Winters’s photos and read his full story here.
Rob Bouchard walks a trail between a section of forest where one side (right) has undergone a wildfire fuel mitigation project and the other side remains heavily loaded with branches, shrubs and other flammable understory.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
What else you missed
- Alberta oil company fined $15K for not reporting release of toxic sour gas
- Marineland succeeds in bid to sever property so it can raise money to move animals
- Countries meet in Rome to make fresh attempt at $200-billion nature finance deal
- Trump administration fires 1,000 workers at National Park Service, raises maintenance concerns
- Singh talks up east-west clean electricity grid, not pipelines, as top NDP energy priority
- Environmental groups sue to block Trump’s offshore drilling expansions
- Climate change is shrinking glaciers faster than ever, with 7 trillion tons lost since 2000
- Webb telescope observes violence around the Milky Way’s central black hole
Opinion and analysis
John Rapley: It’s time for Canadian pension funds to have a climate mandate
Green Investing
America’s biggest oil producers adjust to a new reality in the Gulf of Whatever
Occidental Petroleum Corp. did not waste time amending its investor materials to reflect U.S. President Donald Trump’s new name for one of its main operating regions, but executives and analysts had some difficulty making the shift during a quarterly earnings call.
In its fourth-quarter news release and slides, Houston-based Occidental OXY-N refers to its U.S. offshore oil and gas holdings as being located in the Gulf of America, reflecting the contentious unilateral change the President imposed on all federal references to the region made in January. The body of water has been known as the Gulf of Mexico since at least the late 16th century.
- Pensions need to step up on climate as political momentum wavers, advocacy group says
- BP to ditch renewables goals and return focus to fossil fuels, sources say
- Vanguard pauses corporate meetings over new ESG guidance, sources say
The Climate Exchange
We’ve launched the next chapter of The Climate Exchange, an interactive, digital hub where The Globe answers your most pressing questions about climate change. More than 300 questions were submitted as of September. The first batch of answers tackles 30 of them. They can be found with the help of a search tool developed by The Globe that makes use of artificial intelligence to match readers’ questions with the closest answer drafted. We plan to answer a total of 75 questions.
Photo of the week
Trucks drop their loads of snow at the Angrignon snow deposit site in Montreal on Friday, Feb. 21, 2025.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Guides and Explainers
- Want to learn to invest sustainably? We have a class for that: Green Investing 101 newsletter course for the climate-conscious investor. Not sure you need help? Take our quiz to challenge your knowledge.
- We’ve rounded up our reporters’ content to help you learn about what a carbon tax is, what happened at COP29 and just generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
- We have ways to make your travelling more sustainable and if you like to read, here are books to help the environmentalist in you grow, as well as a downloadable e-book of Micro Skills - Little Steps to Big Change.
Catch up on Globe Climate
- To survive winter, we need to slow down
- Canadian clean tech versus U.S. politics
- Tariffs, blueberries and groundhogs
- Canadian environmental policy, meet Trump
We want to hear from you. Email us: GlobeClimate@globeandmail.com. Do you know someone who needs this newsletter? Send them to our Newsletters page.