After enduring smoke-choked Beijing, I’m reliving the experience in Canada

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Joanna Chiu is a B.C-based journalist, author of China Unbound and managing partner of Nüora Global Advisors.

Each morning, I peer outside, bracing for smoke. For weeks, I’ve kept all the windows in my B.C. home shut, air purifiers droning day and night.

A heavy haze over the weekend brought that familiar pit-of-the-stomach dread – another raging wildfire, maybe even an evacuation alert. But it was just clouds and much-needed rain. Opening the windows, the cool breeze felt like a revelation, and I realized how tense I had been.

I spent five years as a journalist in Beijing, where the smog was often so dense that I thought I could scoop it from the sky. On most days of the year, industrial air purifiers in my office and apartment roared. I felt like I was living inside an airplane.

Even with N95 masks and filters, I developed asthma. I jolted awake at night gasping, desperately reaching for my inhaler. I looked forward to visiting family in Vancouver twice a year, dreaming of blue skies and the simple joy of hiking without coughing up black mucus.

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Since returning to Canada in 2018, I’ve split my time between Vancouver and interior B.C., but my relief has vanished. Each wildfire season, sometimes starting in late spring and stretching into fall, smoke blankets swathes of the country. Nearly nine million hectares have burned this year, making this Canada’s second-worst wildfire season on record.

I’m back to a life indoors, never far from my inhaler. Purifiers filter fine particles, but they don’t make up for the oxygen drop when smoke lingers for weeks, sapping energy and productivity. New research from UBC and international scientists linked Canadian wildfire smoke in 2023 to more than 85,000 premature deaths worldwide. The study made me think of a young friend from Britain who died of heart failure in his sleep; there was no way to know if pollution played a role, but I had always wondered if he would still be alive if he hadn’t moved to Beijing.

Trying to warn my friends and family to stay inside and buy air purifiers, I worry they think I’m hysterical. Compared to Chinese people who have lived through famines and revolutions, Canadians tend to be an optimistic bunch. But in my rural B.C. community, it’s not unusual to know someone who has lost their home and belongings to wildfire.

The material losses are staggering, but the mental toll is just as devastating and less openly discussed: the helplessness of not being able to protect children and the elderly; the stress of deciding what to stuff into an emergency bag; kids growing up with “smoke days.” Routines once associated with Beijing or Delhi are now part of Canadian life.

It’s worse when wildfires and climate-related landslides block evacuation routes. Short of owning a helicopter, there could be literally no escape from a fast-spreading wildfire. Experts say Canadians must brace for this kind of apocalyptic nightmare.

At a recent wildfire reporting boot camp, I absorbed sobering warnings. “Future wildfires like the one that burned 90 per cent of homes and businesses in Lytton in 2021 are inevitable. That fire killed two people, but a mass-casualty fire causing even greater loss of life is very possible in Canada,” Lori Daniels, a UBC forestry professor, told me.

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Prof. Daniels said that rural and First Nations communities are particularly at risk and many are still ill-prepared, lacking funds for clearing forest fuels, training, evacuation plans and firefighting equipment.

Communities and governments need to be ready for hospitals to be overwhelmed and evacuations to be chaotic. That requires stronger, more equitably distributed investment in mitigation, emergency planning and clear communication so people know how to act when wildfires strike.

I thought I had escaped a life of low-level dread – until wildfires began burning across Canada from coast to coast. It’s important not to let anxiety consume us, but Canadians can’t treat each fall as a reset. The summer’s fires linger in our air and in our psyches. This is our new normal.

There are many ways to avert the worst-case scenarios. Because there’s one thing we should all agree on: open windows should not be a luxury.