People on bikes are seen at Burnaby Mountain Park, as smoke from wildfires settles over the region, in Burnaby, B.C., on July 21.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Looking up at a smoke-filled sky that is shrouding the dim glow of an apocalyptic sun has become an all too familiar experience for most Canadians these past few years. It has become an unhappy ritual of summer, one that we are only starting to comprehend.
The most obvious harms of this new era of regular, devastating wildfires – battling to protect cities and towns, evacuating their inhabitants, dealing with the financial, emotional and psychological scars of losing the beloved places people call home – have rightly been the first priority.
They command time and money and vast resources, as they should. But they are not the only harms of worsening wildfire seasons.
“There is no good smoke,” said Mike Flannigan, scientific director of the Institute for Wildfire Science, Adaptation and Resiliency at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia.
By that Mr. Flannigan meant the effects on human health: headaches, scratchy throats, coughing, longer term risks such as heart attacks and strokes. A litany of things to worry about.
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But he could very well be talking about smoke occupying the sky in summer at sudden, unpredictable times, the number of days it will stay there as uncertain as the sight of it is unsettling.
No one can say of a summer day that smoke in the sky made it better.
Summer is a short season, and the number of days of warm temperatures and sunny skies are shorter still, depending on where you live in Canada.
It is still our respite from long winters, but there is a threat to it now that seems as inescapable as sunburns and the smell of freshly cut grass.
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The worst fire season on record in Canada was 2023, with fires consuming 16.5-million hectares, an area about 29 times the size of Prince Edward Island, or roughly one-sixth the entire area of Ontario.
A year later, wildfires ravaged Jasper, Alta. Last year was the second worst wildfire season in Canada, with fires in nearly every province and territory that burned more than 8.3-million hectares.
The toll of this year has yet to be taken – wildfire season doesn’t officially end until Oct. 31 – but with the fires in northwestern Ontario and those burning across B.C., it is already horrifying.
It might seem somewhat unreal that thousands of hectares are on fire, there are walls of flames and mass evacuations, but that is the new normal.
Stepping out our front doors to skies that are grey or strangely yellow or sometimes hellishly red. Beach days with the sky blurred out. Going for ice cream with the acrid smell and taste of wood smoke lingering in the air. Loved ones with respiratory issues trapped indoors.
A man in a mask works on his sailboat in Toronto as wildfire smoke fills the city, on July 15.Laura Proctor/The Canadian Press
Knowing that far away something much more nightmarish is forcing people to flee their homes, entire communities sometimes levelled. It is the usual idyll of summer turned existentially unnerving.
If it only happened once, or once every few years, it might not be this way. The sight of smoke-filled skies would still be alarming, and there would still be grave concern for communities under immediate threat. But the smoke could more easily be dispelled from people’s minds if it was an aberration.
The regularity of the phenomenon in huge swaths of the country is what makes it so much harder to contend with. It is a certainty now that every year, without exception, at some point, this will be a part of summer for many Canadians.
Smoke in the sky may last only a few days, but before it clears, there is smoke in the sky someplace else, whether it is in another province or across the ocean in France.
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However long it may last, and wherever it may appear, it has become a defining part of summer. And not just these past few years but perhaps indefinitely in to the future.
Most of us have probably accepted that fact. What other option is there? So it gets rationalized. It’s only a few days. The wind will come and skies will clear. Let’s hope for rain. Let’s hope communities are saved. Let’s do our best to keep on doing those summer activities that were planned anyways.
But when that smell is in the air, when that doomsday sun is in the sky, the carefree feeling that summer once was, that feeling is gone.