Ezra Levant examines Alberta’s Jasper wildfires, where 358 structures burned in 30% of the town—now a UNESCO site—while 70% was spared by firefighting. Premier Danielle Smith defends a 50% budget increase ($155M) but blames federal mismanagement under Stephen Gilbo, citing ignored warnings about beetle-killed trees since 2017. Marty Up North (Martin Belanger), an evacuee, slams bureaucratic blocks on controlled burns and tourism-driven neglect of firebreaks, calling it a "frigging disgrace." The crisis reveals how climate activism and ideological forest protection worsened risks, contrasting Jasper’s orderly evacuation with Lahaina’s deadly delays. [Automatically generated summary]
It's the best of our coverage of the Jasper wildfires.
I want you to see with your eyes just how horrific it was.
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And then I'll do one for today.
Hello, my friend.
It's about time that we have a catch-up with Robert Kratrick.
He is our court reporter who's been in Lethbridge, Alberta, for the trial of the Coots III and the Coots IV.
Who are these seven men?
Well, they are charged with various crimes emanating from the border blockade during the trucker convoy of 2022.
He'll have the latest for us.
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And here is the podcast.
Tonight, an update on our reporting from the Jasper Wildfires with Sheila Gunreed and Sidney Fazard.
It's August 5th, and this is C.S. from Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Update On Jasper Wildfires00:13:51
Hello, my friend's heart.
I remember how terrified I was back when the Fort McMurray wildfire seemed to come out of nowhere and consume most of the town.
I was absolutely terrified by the images of the arches, the arcs of fire that were on either side of the road, walls of fire hundreds of feet high, absolutely terrifying.
And that was one of our first large charitable crowdfunders that we did with Rebel News.
That was way back in the early days.
We raised six figures for wildfire relief, and I felt very proud to have done so as an expat Albertan living in Ontario.
Well, another forest fire, as you know, has hit Alberta and it's hit the town of Jasper particularly hard.
Now, we cover wildfires from time to time when there's a political angle.
As you know, Rebel News, we're not like CNN.
We don't cover just everything.
We cover things where there's a bit of a current events, political, ideological question.
It's one of the reasons we went to Maui, the town of Lahaina, when wildfire scorched that place.
There were a lot of political questions.
Why didn't the government ring the alarm bells?
What's happening with the rebuilding of the house?
And we went to Maui to cover it.
Well, it behooves us to do the same in our own country, in the city of Jasper.
Well, Sheila Gunrid went out there with Ake and Simoni to see what's going on because there is a political angle there too.
There is a loosey, goosey, one world Green Party idea, never to chop down a tree.
Well, that's how it was, I suppose, for hundreds of millions of years in the past.
So nature would chop down the trees with forest fires started by lightning.
Massive forest fires would burn millions of acres, and that's how nature was.
Trouble is, that's not exactly conducive to human life, or for that matter, animal life.
And so modern towns and cities have fire breaks or they cull that fuel.
Alas, Stephen Gilbo refused to do that because he wants the Eau Nat Charale.
I won't try and explain it.
I'll leave that to my friend, Sheila Gunreed.
Here, take a look.
Sheila Gunread for Rebel News, and I'm here just west of Hinton, Alberta.
What you see behind me is a police checkpoint preventing people from going into Jasper National Park because the national park has out-of-control wildfires burning within it.
The town site of Jasper, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been lost to wildfire.
30% of the town has burned, mostly the residential area.
Now, I'm here to do this journalism on the cheap.
We took my Jeep, my travel trailer, and we're staying in a campsite up the road.
If you want to support our independent journalism for this trip, but to also keep rebel news journalists out on the street, please consider making a donation at rebelfieldreports.com.
But if you're like me and you feel compelled to help the people and the businesses of Jasper, Alberta, please consider making a donation at helpjasper.ca.
That's our crowdfund where 100% of the proceeds will go to an on-the-ground charity working with the evacuees and businesses of Jasper.
That's helpjasper.ca.
Now, a little bit about our journalism here.
We're on the ground to try to get answers.
Why did this happen?
Why was it so bad?
And what could have been done differently?
That's what you're going to see from us for the next couple of days.
On the ground here in Hinton, Alberta, I'm Sheila Gunread.
My videographer and I, Kian Simone, are on the ground just west of Hinton, Alberta to report on the devastating wildfires that swept through Jasper National Park and claimed a portion of the town.
We're here to get answers.
But if you want to help, please consider making a donation to helpjasper.ca.
That's our crowdfund, where 100% of the proceeds go to a charity working on the ground with Jasper evacuees.
That's helpjasper.ca.
I'm so serious for Rebel News.
My colleague Sheila Gunread and Kian Simone are doing incredible boots on the ground journalism in the area surrounding Jasper following the heartbreaking wildfire that did so much damage to that beautiful community.
And while they are doing that journalism, I'm actually here in Calgary and I had the opportunity to sit down with Premier Danielle Smith and ask her some questions about the management of forests and the federal response and the circumstances that led up to the destruction of a great part of Jasper.
Folks, I just want to encourage you, if you want to help the people who are struggling as a consequence of those fires, you can do so by chipping in at helpjasper.ca.
Very happy.
Now be joined by Premier Danielle Smith.
You know, despite Minister Gilbo's insistence that forest management was well done, can you comment on the fact that the Federal Environment Ministry did not act on its own Jasper Park Management plan to mitigate the fuel load issues in Jasper National Park?
Well, look, I've been reading the same articles that you've been reading and hearing what scientists have said, scientists who worked for Parks Canada and have been raising this issue for many years.
So I think we've got to take that seriously and we've got to take a look at, is there a way that we can remove some of that fuel load?
I've talked to my own forestry and parks minister, Todd Lowen, and asked him if we could do a review so that we could see what the age of the forests are from top to bottom.
Because quite frankly, our forests are the type that they were forged by fire.
And so when they get to be 80 to 100 years old, they die.
And when that happens, there's only three things that are going to occur.
Either you have to do prescribed burns to get rid of that fuel, you have to do mechanical removal, or nature will take its course.
And if we can do a better job of removing that fuel so that we can protect more communities, we should do that.
We'll do a review of the forests that are in our forest protection area and our provincial parks.
And then we'll bring some of that learning to the federal government and ask them to do the same for federal parks.
Now, on the provincial note, what is being done as far as provincial efforts to mitigate the pine beetle fuel load as well in that provincial context?
Well, I can tell you that last year, because we had 2 million hectares burned, Todd Lowen took a dramatically different approach for how we first fight for fires.
But secondly, on the fire guard program.
So one of the things that he realized is that we needed to have a very large fire guard.
I think he's making them 200 meters wide now.
And when we do forest firefighting, when fire does hit and we need to protect a community, we bring the dozers in right away so that we're able to clear out a fire break area.
Because we've seen what happens with fire.
When you get that huge fuel load coming, you need to have a break.
Sometimes you do backburns, so you create a wall of fire that burns back, but you have to be careful with that because sometimes the wind can get in the way.
But when you have the kind of flames that we saw in Jasper, three to four hundred feet high, two kilometers wide, by that point, there's no firefighting team that can stop it.
The work that you have to do has to come beforehand.
Great.
Now, in an effort to tackle sort of some of the misinformation, disinformation that is out there, and I'll ask the question, I know you've answered it, but people have been very eager to perpetuate this myth that Premier Daniel Smith cut the wildfire budget, the firefighting budget.
You've indicated that that's not true already, if you can comment on that.
Hello, Premier Smith.
Thank you for taking my question.
So your government over the last few years has made various cuts to Alberta's wildfire fighting budget.
Do you regret making those cuts now?
Why not?
But also, where do you think that came from and why were people so excited to repeat it?
Well, I can tell you what we observed last year is that we had a $100 million forest fire budget and Todd Lowen said, well, what's our typical fire year?
Let's bring our budget up to that need.
And so he got a 50% increase in budget this year, up to $155 million.
We launched our fire season early.
We started hiring our people in place early and we were ready to go by May 15th before the bulk of the fires came in.
We have contracts with Indigenous forest firefighters and we also have contracts with private sector operators.
So at this precise moment, our Alberta force is 1,800 people strong.
And that is, so I feel like that is the kind of a force that we need to be prepared to put forward each year.
And then, of course, we use the Canadian Forest Fire Interagency Center to be able to collaborate with other provinces and to put our resources towards them when things change.
I think what happened was a number of years ago, there was something called a Hellatack team.
And this was a team that goes in helicopters and then they repel into an area so that they can fight fires.
And what we discovered is they were barely being deployed, only in 2% of the cases, for a number of reasons.
It's dangerous.
Number two, when you have, there's only certain types of landscapes that they can be on.
And so what we realized is that we have to fight fires differently.
So what we do is we've got infrared drones, we've got night vision helicopters, we do nighttime firefighting so that we can precision drop teams once we know where the fires are so that they can fight at night.
And it's been very successful.
Now, finally, obviously, places like Jasper are national parks.
They fall within that jurisdiction.
But as we're seeing, it's Albertans who are suffering.
Do you feel that there's a need for increased provincial involvement?
Or is it important to leave that jurisdiction federal?
Yes, there absolutely is a need for provincial involvement.
We have been an advising agency through the forest fires.
And I can tell you that when Jasper evacuated, I was on the phone immediately asking our team to do whatever we could.
I said, we just can't let Jasper burn.
And so they already proactively positioned a bunch of equipment so that if the call came in, they were ready for it.
The call did come in and we were ready to put all of our resources.
We gave them everything that they asked for.
But when we're going through this next phase, we have to remember that Parks Canada, I don't believe, has the expertise to manage a rebuild of this nature.
I mean, Parks Canada does a lot of forest firefighting and forest management.
This is really the kind of work that municipal governments do.
Jasper is a very small community.
This is the kind of thing that provincial governments should step into to assist with our expertise.
So, we're going to be an advisor.
I'm happy to be used in any role that they would like, but we also have our own recovery that we need to do.
We need to build a seniors' lodge, one of our seniors' lodges burnt down.
So, we've got to make sure that we're taking care of those folks.
We're working on trying to find a way to get temporary housing that may or may not be just in Jasper, but it could also be in Hinton.
Remember, Hinton is outside the national park.
So, there is a role for us to play in being able to accelerate this.
What we don't want is to look back three years from now and see that no progress has been made.
I think it's been mentioned to me, and I tend to agree, that the permitting process in national parks has sometimes been very slow, and it can't be in this case.
These are folks who need to get their lives back to normal.
And so, this is part of the reason when we were asking to be part of unified command for the incident.
We also asked for that to persist through recovery so that we can be pushing them along and encouraging them to make rapid decisions.
Sheila Gunread for Rebel News, and I'm here just west of Hinton, Alberta, actually, between Hinton and Jasper National Park.
We're here reporting on the devastating wildfires, many of which that are still burning out of control inside of Jasper National Park.
Now, if you want to help in our charitable relief efforts for the people who have been evacuated or have lost homes and businesses inside of Jasper National Park, please consider making a donation at helpjasper.ca.
Now, we're on the ground to tell you exactly what's happening here in Hinton.
We're the first town to the east of Jasper.
Many of the evacuees are here, but also many of the police and firefighting resources are stationed here.
And it is almost impossible to go through the town or anywhere near Jasper without encountering a police checkpoint, like what you see behind us here.
It's really impossible to bring you any original imagery from inside of Jasper because we're not a member of the mainstream media cabal, so we don't get special treatment from the federal government the way CBC did, getting exclusive pooled access to Jasper.
The feds don't like us, we have to sue them to get access to politicians.
They're certainly not going to give us access to the national park, where we are going to ask them some serious questions about their mismanagement of the park and the pine beetle fuel load left inside of it.
So, this morning, in an effort to go around the independent media blackout from the federal government on what's happening inside of Jasper National Park, we took some back roads, we took some logging roads, we tested the suspension of my Jeep today, and we found a high westerly point to put the drone up to see what we could see.
We were not able to get close enough to show you any fire devastation, but we did show you some of the beautiful majesty of, I think, the most beautiful place on the face of this earth, Alberta.
It's just a shame that the feds chose to mismanage the majesty in such a way that they didn't act on warnings about the pine beetle in 2017, 2018, and again in 2022.
Despite such hardship, it is worth celebrating that we have not reported any injuries or casualties.
Jasper's Resilience00:04:42
Around 358 structures, or roughly 30% of the town, was lost to the fire.
But inversely, around 70% of the town was saved.
Years of preparation, force management, simulated evacuations, and firefighting efforts paid off.
What's happening in Jasper is very different than what happened during the recent wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii.
Lahaino was evacuated last minute.
It was disorderly, and people died during the evacuation.
Jasper was evacuated early and orderly, and now these checkpoints prevent looters from going back into the town.
Here on the ground outside of Jasper, Alberta, for Rebel News, I'm Sheila Gunread.
We saw photos and we saw the landscaping of all the places that have been saved and some that weren't.
And yeah, ours was absolutely, it's gone.
And we lost everything.
Sheila Gunread for Rebel News.
I'm here in Edmonton in the Kennedale neighborhood outside of the reception center for the Jasper wildfire evacuees.
For those of you who don't know, some 25,000 people were evacuated because of a wildfire that swept into Jasper National Park over the coming days.
We'll figure out why it happened the way it did and why that fire was so bad.
But right now, we're trying to help the evacuees.
If you'd like to help us by contributing to our 100% charitable crowdfund, please visit helpjasper.ca.
Now, this is not the busiest reception center.
It seems as though the Scholdice Reception Center in Calgary is the busier evacuee center.
But we were grateful enough to speak to an evacuee named Michael and his son who were both able to tell us a little bit about what their experience has been like as a Jasper fire evacuee.
Take a listen.
So Michael, you're from Jasper?
We lived in Jasper, yes.
For 14 years I've been there and it's just absolutely devastating what has happened to our town, our community, and us personally.
We were one of the unlucky ones and we lost everything.
And so we've come to the center and they are so helpful and so friendly and they're doing everything in their power to help everybody in our community and I don't know where we would be if we didn't have the Red Cross and all the great people behind it all.
And so you know that your home has been lost?
Oh yes.
Yeah, we know.
We saw photos and we saw the landscaping of all the places that have been saved and some that weren't and yeah ours was absolutely it's gone and we lost everything.
I'm so sorry to hear that.
Can you tell us a little bit about what the experience has been like for the evacuees here in Edmonton?
For myself, just and my son, the way it's our friends have helped us out a lot and just being able to come here and you know see what they have to offer all the people from Jasper it's great from lodging to food to receiving money from the government.
It's just it's it really it really warms your heart to know that there's people like these people that are here to help us.
I don't know where we would be if we didn't have our friends and we didn't have the Red Cross.
I just don't know.
If there's one thing that you would like the people to know about Jasper, about the evacuees, what would it be?
Maybe it's best.
What Jasper is like and the evacuees.
Everybody has a different story.
I don't know what else to say.
How can the public support the evacuees?
Different Stories00:06:30
Just keep on doing what you're doing, you know.
And if you know somebody from Jasper that, you know, needs help, just keep on, you know, lend a helping hand.
And to think that over all those decades, we would not have deployed all of the resources necessary to try and do everything that is humanly possible to protect a town from a forest fire is simply not true.
They should have had all that pine beetle and that forest fire deadwood gone long time ago.
It's BS.
Sheila Gunnread for Rebel News and I'm here in Hinton, Alberta.
I'm in Hinton because it is the next town over to the east of Jasper National Park.
Now for those of you who don't know, Jasper National Park was hit by a devastating wildfire that swept into the historic town site, claiming 30% of the town site, mostly residential areas.
If you would like to help the people of Jasper, please consider making a donation to our 100% charitable efforts at a special crowdfund, helpjasper.ca.
Now, I am here in town to do some journalism.
The federal government and specifically parks minister, environment and climate change minister Stephen Gilbo says that the federal government did everything they could to eliminate or mitigate the fuel load in the forest in Jasper.
The trees in Jasper, 44% of them were touched by the mountain pine beetle, leaving standing deadfall all around the park.
For years, the local MP, the mayor, and locals have complained about the dangerous fuel load in and around the Jasper town site.
Stephen Gilbo says enough was done to deal with it.
And this is what we were faced with.
And the fact that we were able to protect 70% of the town speaks to all of those measures we have put in place over the years and frankly.
His own documents from his own ministry say no.
We're in town to talk to the locals, the people who use the park, who see the park nearly every day, what they think about Stephen Gilbo's excuses.
My question is, do you think the feds did enough in Jasper National Park to clear out the pine beetle deadfall?
Absolutely not.
No, I don't think they did, but that's all on half the feds wanting to do stuff, half the national park not allowing people to come in because it's natural.
Right.
Right?
So you can only do so much on that.
No, it's been decades of forest mismanagement over there.
I work in Jasper everyone.
It was a matter of time before this happened.
So now it's happened, I guess it's happened.
I don't know.
Nope, not at all.
How long do you think it's been a problem?
Oh, it's been going on for years.
Yeah.
No, it's they should have done a lot more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because this is ridiculous.
It's sad.
It's sad.
You know, how many people are losing their homes and everything because of all this?
You know, no, there should have been more dark forests.
No, not at all.
How long has it been a problem?
Oh, I'd say since what, uh, 2015, 2016, they should have done some more cleanup.
And I mean, they did a bit, but not enough.
I've been going there for years, and it's a frigging disgrace.
I mean, there was no greenery left around there.
Like, I mean, there were great big patches of pine beetle kill, and they didn't do nothing about it.
I was waiting years.
When are they going to do something?
When are they going to do something?
Never happened.
They should have had all that pine beetle and that forest fire deadwood gone long time ago.
It's BS.
Sorry, my opinion.
No, thank you.
Appreciate it.
That's why I'm asking you.
Yeah, no, it's ridiculous.
Like, the town should not have had to burn.
Thanks, Mr. Trudeau.
Well, there you have it.
It sounds like the people who live here and use the park have a different opinion than that of the minister responsible for taking care of the park.
I guess you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
And at the end of the day, Stephen Gilbo seems to be only fooling himself because he's the only person buying his own BS.
It's like he's getting high on his own supply.
For Rebel News here in Hinton, I'm Sheila Gunnery.
And so we are here to investigate why it got so bad once it breached the park.
And the longer we are here and the longer we are since the fire ended up in the town site, the more facts are coming out.
And those facts are really inconvenient for the federal government and specifically the Environment Ministry and Environment Minister Stephen Gilbo.
I'm here with my videographer Kian Simoni.
He's been behind the camera for the entire day today.
We were able to film four videos on the ground and we have a little bit of time tonight before we have to get back at it again tomorrow morning.
So we thought we'd sit down and film the weekly gun show just to talk about what we saw, what we weren't able to see, and what we learned along the way.
So I guess we'll start with how accessible the Jasper Town site is.
We saw that CBC videographers were able to go into the Jasper Town site.
I was unimpressed with the quality of the video that they brought out of there.
In fact, I found Premier Daniel Smith's B-roll of the Jasper Town site to be far more compelling.
But that's what they call pooled video, means that CBC went and gathered it and then everybody else can use it.
But really the rest of us can't get in there.
The video that I saw was literally just pictures that they have taken.
CBC's Missed Opportunity00:03:51
They went in there.
When you mentioned it before, you said that they didn't get out of their car, but I feel like that's even worse is not actually showing.
I didn't feel like it showed the magnitude of it at all.
Yeah.
Just bugs.
Bugs.
Bugs were outdoors.
Yeah, no, and that's, I felt like they didn't do it justice at all.
You know, me being from Toronto, the biggest disaster I've seen is traffic.
So I guess maybe it's selfish, but I was bummed out that we weren't able to see anything and experience it and to be able to show other people who don't really actually know how bad it was.
Yeah, CBC was, I guess, hand-selected by the feds because the feds have jurisdiction over the national park, even though the national park is in Alberta.
And it was kind of worse than disappointing.
I feel like it was a complete dereliction duty, the quality of the images that they took while they were in Jasper.
The world is watching with heartbreak, you know, like it is the second most visited national park in this country.
And people wanted to really see as best they could what happened there, and we got stills and a TikTok.
And they sent an army of people here, and they didn't get anything that an army should have gotten, like an army of videographers, a cameraman, or journalists.
We saw it with our own eyes when we were standing there.
I was doing drone work and camera work, and you were doing all the journalism.
We had no lights because we were using the sun in the daytime.
And then beside us, they had these lights and the van battery plugged into the camera producer who's on the phone with someone else, probably from Ottawa, and then a journalist standing there who's also on the phone with someone.
And it was just like, what are you guys doing?
Yeah.
It's true.
Kian's not making this up.
We're standing up on the top of the hill overlooking the police checkpoint that stops people from going into Jasper.
And we're standing there working, the two of us.
And an SUV pulls up.
And then another SUV pulls up.
And then another van pulls up.
Four people jump out.
One is the journalist.
I think they have like a cameraman, a sound guy, a producer, and then the journalist.
Their cameras have to be hooked to the battery of the van and the van has to stay running so they can do the journalism that we are doing with this camera and this microphone and our cell phones.
And then they wonder where all their like $1.6 billion of journalism bailout money goes.
It was ridiculous.
But let's talk about the inability to get to see anything in the Jasper town site.
Why don't you tell the people the lengths to which we went for half the day just to try to get close enough to get drone footage?
Yeah, the drone that we have, you know, it can go about a thousand meters.
And so trying to get close enough to Jasper Park, which I feel like we were like kilometers and kilometers away, you know, we're driving down logging roads, roads that I don't even think were logging roads.
They were just gravel roads that someone made for fun, it felt like at points.
And then to put the drone up, which lost signal before I could even get past a mountain, there is literally no way that you can see what's going on in there.
Yeah.
And you mean you'd have to drive, you know, hours in one direction maybe, and then hours in the other direction, then come back, and I feel like it'd still be closed.
Yeah.
Well, and it was.
The town of Hinton is teeming with RCMP, but it's also teaming with first responders.
I think they're occupying most of the hotel space here.
Wildfire Response Efforts00:14:45
So there are teams of firefighters from all over the province, now all over the country.
And it looks like from other parts of the world, I saw South Africa sent some firefighters.
Military is in town also to help assist with the fires.
And this is all, even though the fire is burning within the federal national park, the province has really moved every resource that they could in to help.
Well, the news isn't just in Jasper.
It's in evacuee centers in the rest of the province.
Here's Sydney Bazard covering one center for people evacuating from Jasper.
There's another water truck park there, I think.
Here's mom and dad's house.
We were evacuated late on Monday evening and then made our way down 3BC to get around to here and sort of found out on social media this morning sort of thing that our house had burnt down.
People have been saying for months that Jasper was going to burn.
We're part of nature and we're smarter than nature.
We should be able to live in nature and not lose our homes every 10 years.
Sydney Fizard for Rebel News, disaster has struck the Jasper area as a massive wildfire has obliterated the town and surrounding area, with thousands upon thousands of people evacuating, seeking refuge, some of them behind me here at the reception center in Calgary.
Countless locals have been left unemployed, homeless, and deprived of the community they call home.
On July 22nd, a state of emergency was declared and evacuation orders put in place, causing the displacement of roughly 25,000 Jasper locals and tourists.
Many are now seeking refuge at reception centers like the one here in Calgary and other Alberta cities for food, shelter, and other means of support as flames continue to ravage their community.
Devastated by the damage this wildfire has caused, those here are now faced with the harsh reality this situation has brought.
Many were reluctant to speak to their circumstances on camera at this time.
However, we were able to speak to some of the affected individuals just outside this facility to find out a little bit more about what transpired and how it has impacted them.
Not only is this a crisis for those directly affected by this wildfire, the situation has also sparked a national conversation around how wildfires should be mitigated and whether negligent climate activism has a role to play in wildfire management.
We also spoke with Martin Belanger, known online as Marty Up North, a prominent Alberta outdoorsman content creator who took social media by storm after posting his reaction to this wildfire situation.
With decades of experience exploring and living near Jasper National Park, Marty details his concerns around how lacking forest maintenance and political decision-making may have been prime factors in exacerbating the crisis we now see today.
Homes and businesses have been lost to a wildfire that people are calling a wall of flames.
There is no denying that this is the worst nightmare for any community.
To the residents of Jasper and those displaced far from home looking at the images of your town on TV and online, the feelings of loss and fear and loneliness must be overwhelming.
But you are not alone.
All Albertans are with you.
For many generations, the town of Jasper and the parks surrounding it have been a source of pride with some of the most beautiful scenery in the entire world.
I live just on the outskirts of Jasper.
I lived in Edson, Fox Creek.
I spent 20 years living up north.
In fact, online, my name is Marty Up North.
So people often ask why that is.
And yeah, I consider Jasper a playground.
I mean, I spent 20 years exploring the backcountry of Jasper.
I've seen lots of wildfires.
I mean, I'm an Albertan.
You know, I've seen Slave Lake.
I've seen Fort McMurray.
At firsthand, I've seen lots of wildfires.
Working in the oil patch, we'd often get asked to offer assistance.
Have I ever seen one like this?
From what I can tell, no, I've never seen one like this one.
This one looks devastating.
I mean, I'm getting emotional thinking about it.
I do not look forward to going back to Jasper in the coming days to see what it looks like.
So I work at the ski hill that's just outside Jasper Town site.
And yeah, all me and my flatmates sort of, we were evacuated late on Monday evening and then made our way down through BC to get around to here and sort of found out on social media this morning sort of thing that our house had burnt down.
So yeah, we're sort of displaced at the moment.
But yeah, it's pretty rough times at the moment for everyone from the town.
Like a lot of Jasper has burnt, from what we know, I think it's like 70%.
And right now we don't have anywhere to go.
We're sorting out a hotel right now.
Our jobs, we don't know when Milgate looks to go back.
Leaving was really scary.
I think like 25,000 people evacuated and there was like about three hours worth of cars like bumper to bumper trying to get out.
The SO fire made a significant push driven by wind and very receptive fuels.
There's very, very dry conditions in Jasper right now.
The fire behavior was quite intense starting at about around one o'clock.
Fire crews were witnessing three to four hundred foot flames, fully involved, continuous crown fire and a fire spread rate of approximately 15 meters per minute.
One of the things that is normally set in place to help mitigate this is controlled burns.
We've obviously seen in Banff last year, there was a controlled burn that went loose and actually caused a great deal of devastation in a smaller regard to what we're seeing now.
But what's your take on the controlled burns that have been had and are they doing this appropriately?
They haven't had enough.
I mean, I'm familiar with controlled burns because often when I go hiking on hikes, what we do beforehand is we'll go look on advisories on the government website, the park's website, to see where they're planning on doing burns.
And honestly, in the last three or four years, there hasn't been any very many burns.
And of the ones they've attempted, they've been unsuccessful.
They've either gotten away on them or they were too small.
It's ironic, but they've had some that were too small.
They tried to make bigger ones that didn't function.
You know, the bureaucracy is causing problems.
I think they're just hiding it under climate change.
I mean, do I believe in climate change?
Sure, there's lots of natural climate.
We live in Alberta.
I mean, I can go in the Rockies and show evidence of hundreds of millions of years of climate change, but am I going to blame everything that's happening now in climate change?
No, I tend to blame government incompetence.
It happened really fast.
Like we were just out at the lake and then all of a sudden a storm picked up and a lightning strike happened and then there was just black smoke coming from everywhere.
From when we returned home from work in the evening to the point in which we were evacuated, it was extraordinarily quickly.
The fire started and just spread so fast really.
I think it was less just under two hours from the point of where we heard about the fire starting and then yeah it was in under two hours that it went from that to a warning to evacuation to leaving town.
And you mentioned in a tweet that's gone viral that it is particularly the last decade where you've seen a deterioration of this quality of service.
What was it like before?
Before the park had a proper mandate of protecting the park and managing the park and I think somewhere in the last 15, 20 years you know the idea of making money off tourists changed the mandate of the park.
And so 20 years ago we had no services in the backcountry or even in the front country.
I mean you kind of used at your own risk.
But now the park is collecting money and doing all these weird things to I think attract tourists and to make money but they're caught in the loop of having to provide services, upgrade those services and then they're neglecting the actual mandate which is to protect the wilderness.
Jasper National Park, one of Canada's major tourist destinations, has been devastated by the pine beetle infestation.
Much of the forest is dead or dying.
The dead trees are a tremendous fuel load and present a significant risk to the community of Jasper.
Residents are concerned for their own safety and that of the visitors and the security of their homes.
With a high risk of wildfires fueled by a forest devastated by the pine beetle, have the Liberals put a plan in place to protect this park.
The Honourable Minister for Environment and Climate Change.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Our government is absolutely committed to the ecological integrity of our national parks.
That is my first priority as the minister.
We are working very hard in all of our parks, including Jasper National Park.
I look forward to talking to the member further about this and seeing how we can move forward.
They used to harvest.
They used to log.
I mean, if an area got affected by pine beetles, for instance, they wouldn't just let those stands of pine beetle-infested trees stay there.
They would go cut some down.
And maybe not in the summer, but you can do it in winter or whatever.
You could even do it using old technologies like horse-drawn systems.
Lately, they haven't done that.
I mean, that was one of my number one complaints.
Every time I, everybody's seen it.
Every Calgarian's seen it.
When you drive through the Rockies, when you drive along the highway, you see the slopes on the mountains and all the trees are dead.
And they're leaving these dead trees there, which is just tinder, just firewood.
So that's an example.
I mean, they used to do cleanup around town.
And I mean, if there's a fire in the backcountry, that's one thing.
But we're talking, this is like a fire that came through town.
I mean, that's completely unacceptable.
Like, they should have cleared some land, put a firewall around there, prepared people.
Like, I mean, we've had, what?
We've had five or six major municipalities in the last 15 years.
You know, we've had Fort McMurray, Slave Lake.
We've had last year it was all around Grand Prairie.
I mean, this is not new.
And we've got municipalities that are still unprepared.
I mean, yeah, like when we talk about Jasper or BAF, there's the national, there's the big park, the wilderness, but there's the town.
And I think in this case, it's the town that was really neglected.
On the environmental aspect, a lot of people are seeing this wildfire and they're blaming environmentalism for an increase in wildfires.
Whereas if you're actively preventing wildfires, I imagine no doubt there's going to be a buildup of, as you mentioned, the tools needed for wildfires to naturally develop, such as all this dead wood we see.
Do you think that these things are related?
Do you think that the environmentalists should perhaps be thinking of environmental maintenance and sustainability as opposed to just blaming it for the disaster?
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, you know, the environmentalists in some instances are their own worst enemies.
Like an example that I hear all the time is people talking about, oh, we need to protect old growth forests.
And people don't actually know what an old growth forest is.
And, you know, people imagine that an old growth forest is something in British Columbia with these big sequoias or whatever.
But an old growth forest simply means trees that have gotten too old.
Well, so the language penetrated the environmental movement and everybody's like, let's protect the old growth forest, which started to mean let's protect everything.
Well, no, we can't do that because a forest has a life cycle and at some point the trees are going to die.
So either they die naturally and burn or we go and help with the management.
So yeah, I think the environmental movement has hurt itself in some instances.
And now in hindsight or after all these disasters, it's easy to blame everybody but, right?
No politician is going to take blame for this.
No environmentalist is going to take blame for this.
No company is going to take blame for this.
We're going to blame it on climate change, which is easy.
It was a lightning strike, so it just would have happened.
But from what we've heard, there's like the trees in Jasper are like dying or something.
So like when the lightning strike happened, it just like went up in flames.
But people have been saying for months that Jasper was going to burn.
I think the most surprising thing is just how quickly it happens.
Like we left about 48 hours ago and now there's nothing left.
You think you have more time for that kind of thing, but just like that, it's all gone.
What should be done or needs to be done now for you guys for the moment and moving forward?
Currently there's been a really good response, especially here from like the evacuation centers in the city and information has been really good in terms of being passed out from like the municipality of Jasper on social media and stuff.
So we've known where to go and what to do.
Currently we're being put into hotels indefinitely while we sort of figure out what the next move is for it.
Just need some more clarity on the situation I suppose.
I know there's only so much they can know and it's a developing situation but it would be good to have some kind of roadmap that just outlines what's going to happen, what we're going to get in terms of reparations and what the next few weeks or few months is going to look like.
That'll be good to know.
I just hope that everybody gets out safe and for the people that like have been living in Jasper their whole lives like I just hope that they're going to be okay and get some sort of compensation or something because we know people who have lived there forever and now their homes are gone and I just really hope that everything will be okay for them.
What do you think needs to be done for the people that we're seeing behind us for the town of Jasper itself now and moving forward?
What should be done for them?
I hope it's minimal.
I hope the damage can be rebuilt quickly.
I mean that's what I'd like to do.
I mean Banff is a gem.
Jasper is a gem.
They're important to our economy, to tourism.
You know, I just said it.
I mean, as much as the parks are there as parks, they are also there for tourism.
So hopefully we rebuild it quickly, but we got to rebuild it and learn from this.
But that's the part that upsets me.
Living in the Middle of Alberta's Wildfires00:01:06
We're not learning.
I mean, after the fires in Fort McMurray, we should have put a one mile radius around the town of Banff where we cut all the trees.
Let's learn from this.
Like we've had, like, this is nothing new.
I don't know why we're, I don't know why we're pretending that this is a new phenomenon.
Like, let's not fool ourselves.
We live in the middle of, we live in Alberta where there are huge forests.
And we used to be good at doing this.
Like this, when I was a kid, this didn't happen every year.
You didn't burn down towns.
So let's remind ourselves of where we live and let's be realistic and pragmatic and let's forget some of these crazy ideologies and let's focus on what's important, which is, you know, the fact that we live in the wilderness and we need to be prepared for the inevitable fires.
They will always happen.
You mean we're part of nature?
We're part of nature and we're smarter than nature.
We should be able to live in nature and not, you know, lose our homes every 10 years.
For Rebel News, I'm Sydney Fizzard.
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