Tape and signage prevents people entering wooded park space at York Redoubt National Historic Site trail in Nova Scotia.Ted Pritchard/The Globe and Mail
Stephen Maher lives in rural Nova Scotia. He is the author of The Prince: The Rise and Fall of Justin Trudeau.
I realized how dry the woods are in Nova Scotia when I stopped my car by the side of the road the other day and briefly stood on the gravel shoulder. The woods smelled dry, almost smoky, like they wanted to be on fire.
It’s not how this typically soggy peninsula normally smells. But we have had less than half the normal seasonal amount of rain this summer. The last substantial rain fell on June 7. Wells are drying up. The whole province is in a state of extreme fire risk.
So when Premier Tim Houston announced on Tuesday that he was ordering the woods closed, I was glad.
The ban is a blunt instrument. Anyone who walks or rides through the woods risks a $25,000 fine. There is a tip line to encourage neighbours to snitch on one another. New Brunswick now has a similar ban.
Editorial: Provincial forest bans miss the point
Nova Scotians lament early end to summer after wildfire risks force ban on most outdoor activities
I miss running through the wooded trail near my house, and dislike running on the side of the road, with cars whizzing past me, but that’s life. There is no chance that my plodding morning jog will set the woods on fire, so the rule is absurd, but fires are mostly caused by dimwitted and careless people, and there is no way of separating them from their careful neighbours, so the ban is necessary.
Nova Scotia is a widely settled province, with many homes on back roads. We can’t afford wildfires. And as climate change makes the world hotter and drier, we are at greater risk, in part because hurricanes left so many deadfalls.
Wildfires in 2023 destroyed 25,000 hectares here, nothing compared to the vast northern blazes in western provinces, but more than 200 homes were burnt and thousands had to be evacuated.
There is no sign of widespread opposition to the ban. Nova Scotia’s all-terrain vehicle users and nudists, for example, support the measure, although it means curtailing their recreational activities during a lovely August.
However, opposition is starting to spread through the social-media webs that rage farmers spun during the pandemic.
Jeffrey Evely, an Afghan vet who was convicted for mischief and obstruction for his role in the 2022 convoy protests in Ottawa, was fined $28,872.50 last week after he went into the woods outside the provincial forestry office.
Mr. Evely was represented in the convoy case by a lawyer from the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a libertarian organization founded by former Reform candidate John Carpay, who was banned from practising law in Manitoba after he hired a private investigator to tail a judge during the COVID pandemic.
I expect the centre to represent Mr. Evely as he challenges the woods ban in court on Charter grounds. I expect they will lose.
It’s hard to imagine judges deciding that a woods travel ban isn’t a reasonable limit “as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,” as is allowed in Section 1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That is what they found when the group challenged pandemic travel bans here.
The premier at the time, Stephen McNeil, imposed a lockdown as a preventive measure, telling people to “stay the blazes home.” Nova Scotians embraced the measures and had shorter lockdowns and lower rates of infection. Atlantic Canadians had the lowest COVID death rates in the Western hemisphere, comparable to those in East Asia.
Nova Scotians are protecting their province from fire as they protected it from disease, drawing on a communitarian political tradition and high levels of social trust.
The opposition to these measures is mostly coming from points west, parts of Canada with a more libertarian political culture. A ban on entering the woods would likely not work in Western Canada, because so many people would see it as an infringement on their personal liberty. They are fuming even though this doesn’t affect them.
Their libertarianism is a force for individual freedom, at the glorious heart of our constitutional tradition, but, as the Americans say, the constitution is not a suicide pact. In emergencies, the state must protect public health, and wildfire is a pressing risk to Canadians’ health.
The world has entered the pyrocene era, where climate-induced wildfires are choking our lungs, destroying communities and turning our boreal forest into a source of emissions. The individualists who object to public safety measures to reduce the risk are the same people who complain loudest when governments try to reduce the emissions that have put us in this situation.
They are not going to win this argument in Nova Scotia.