A Canadair firefighting aircraft helps fight wildfires at the Fontainebleau forest, in Acheres-la-Foret, France on July 13.Stephane Mahe/Reuters
Michael Ignatieff is a former Liberal Party leader and professor of history and rector emeritus of Vienna’s Central European University.
My family and I were holidaying in France in 1989 when a Canadair water bomber swooped over a nearby fire in the forests of Provence and dropped a load of red fire-retardant water to douse the flames. I still remember how my son, then five years old, looked up, pointed, and said: “Canada.”
Today, France is on fire again, with flames also blazing a path of death and destruction in Spain and Greece. But exhausted Europeans standing in burned-out, smoking ruins this week aren’t looking skyward in awe of Canadian ingenuity. Instead, many of them are asking: Where are the Canadairs?
Canadair water bombers are a triumph of Canadian aviation. The most modern ones are capable of swooping over a lake or ocean, taking in about 6,000 litres of water in 12 seconds, and dumping it on a fire before going back for another load.
Canadair built 125 CL-215 Scoopers, the first model of piston-engine water bombers, between 1969 and 1990. Then, after the program was acquired by Bombardier, the Quebec-based firm built 160 units of a new model, the specialized CL-415 turboprop firefighting aircraft (and its variants), which came out in 1991. Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece all use Canadairs to fight their fires; the French have 12 of them.
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So why are French fire victims not seeing Canadairs when they look up? According to Le Monde, no more than eight of the 12 have been operational at any one time since July 21. The rest are waiting for parts from Canada.
The reason they’re still waiting: Bombardier suspended production of the planes in 2015, when the company decided there wasn’t enough demand.
Pause, if you will, over that detail. In the middle of growing global awareness of climate change and the explosive impact on forest cover, a Canadian company decided that nobody wanted the most effective fire-fighting aircraft ever devised. Too often, climate change awareness works like that: Worthy consciousness that never gets translated into a business plan.
De Havilland Canada acquired the Canadair program in 2016, and resumed production of its own water bomber (the DHC-515) in 2024. It now has back orders from France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Croatia and the EU, which maintains a continent-wide fire-fighting capacity. But the French won’t get their first new planes from the factory in Calgary until 2028 – in the fall, after the fire season.
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Why is production so painfully slow? Agence France Presse went to Calgary to find out, and discovered that the 50,000 separate pieces of the fuselage are bolted on by hand. Why no automation? Because the supply chains that used to sustain production for Bombardier disappeared when production stopped in 2015. As a result, De Havilland has had to scramble to find or make the parts itself. You can’t run an aerospace industry that produces at scale without a permanent supply chain that enables them to automate production for just-in-time assembly.
So here we have a classic Canadian story: We have technology the world wants, but we can’t produce it at speed and at scale. No country can afford to squander an advantage in any domain, especially not in this increasingly urgent space. With some corporate leadership and some federal assistance, though, this can be fixed.
Doing so would also illustrate the importance of disaggregating existential risk like climate change – a crisis so large and so frightening that our anxiety can actually prevent us from doing something about it. It may be that the way we frame climate change is a kind of learned helplessness. We can think our way into a passive posture in which practical steps here and now seem pointless or too late – gesture-politics of an empty virtue-signaling kind.
Producing Canadairs at speed and at scale would represent a tiny, even infinitesimal part of any climate-change adaptation strategy. But we need small successes like this one, to give us the resolve to do more. Besides, it would also be good for Canadian morale if we could imagine more kids, like my son, looking skyward amid the smoke in some foreign country and saying: Canada.