Sheila Gunn-Reid and Michelle Sterling examine the 2023 Jasper wildfire, which destroyed 358 structures despite no casualties, blaming Parks Canada and Stephen Gilbo’s environmental policies—not climate change. They cite 18M hectares of deadwood from pine beetles, blocked logging by activists like Sappora Berman, and decades of fire suppression since 1913, creating uniform, flammable forests. 80 NGOs, including Equitaire and CAPE Doctors, pushed oil/gas blame without solutions, while Logan Lake’s FireSmart measures and Yellowknife’s volunteer efforts proved effective. Gunn-Reid dismisses conspiracy theories, urging controlled burns or logging to prevent future disasters, and directs listeners to support helpjasper.ca. [Automatically generated summary]
For government mismanagement, we're digging down into the Jasper Wildfires.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Despite such hardship, it is worth celebrating that we have not reported any injuries or casualties.
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, forest management, simulated evacuations, and firefighting efforts paid off.
That's our environment minister, Stephen Gilbo.
He's actually the minister in charge of Parks Canada, which is the government department in charge of our national parks, including Jasper National Park.
And as many of you know, Jasper was hit with a devastating wildfire that not only ripped through the park, but through the historic town site, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, destroying 30% of the town, which included mostly the residential area.
So a lot of damage to the town, a lot of people homeless, a lot of businesses destroyed.
But was this inevitable?
And is this a consequence of climate change or something else?
Well, I thought I would go to somebody who has done the research on what happened in Jasper, but also what happened in other towns in our forested areas like Yellowknife to get the truth, to cut through the BS, the fear, and the hysteria.
So joining me now is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
You know, anytime a politician says that something is climate change, I try to go to the experts or at least the person who speaks for the experts and digest the experts' reports in a way that normal people like you and I can understand.
So I went directly to Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science, actually went directly to Friends of Science YouTube page to see, does Michelle have a video yet debunking this theory?
It's not even a theory anymore.
It's, I would suggest, according to the politicians, unquestionable science that what happened in Jasper was a result of climate change and absolutely nothing else.
However, smarter people have different opinions while they still can.
And so joining me now is my friend Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science to tell us what the experts have been saying about Jasper for a very long time.
So I guess I'll just turn it over to you.
You take it away.
Oh, well, thank you, Sheila.
Thanks for having me on the show.
And I do want to reiterate, I'm not a forestry expert, but I do work with forestry and wildland fire experts.
So I get their information and I try and translate it into something that is plain language enough for most of the public to understand.
So of course, the thesis is that the Jasper wildfires and that the 2023 wildfires were all caused by climate change and the climate change was driven by human-induced GHG emissions from big oil.
There's actually even on the heels of the Jasper tragedy, an open letter of 80 environmental groups blaming big oil for the Jasper wildfire, which is just ludicrous.
First of all, it's not true.
For the longest time, British Columbia and Alberta have been deeply infested by pine beetle mountain pine beetle, and it gets into the bark of the trees and ultimately just kills the tree.
So then you have, well, we now have like 18 million hectares of standing deadwood in British Columbia and Alberta.
And it encroached into the park.
And I understand that some years ago, when it first hit BC, Alberta wanted to, you know, go in and aggressively take out that small patch because they were afraid it would spread.
But of course, people like Sappora Berman, who led the tar sands campaign and also prior to that led the war in the woods to stop logging in Clyacotte Sound, you know, they made it almost impossible for anybody to cut down a tree because to these rabid environmentalists and climate activists, every tree is totally sacred, even if it's dead and life-threatening to your community.
So it's not climate change.
It's because there are hectares of land filled with these dead trees, and you can see that they're dead because their needles go red.
So it's not a maple tree.
So they go, first they go kind of yellowish, then they go red, then they go gray, and then they go black, and then they burn.
So these are very, very dangerous fuel loads that have built up.
And if we don't go in and log them out or burn them out with controlled burns, then we're going to have more wildfires like this.
And it's been known for a long time.
It's in parks management reports.
So, you know, of course, it's difficult when you're a tourist site because the reality is that people come there to see the trees.
They want to see it in a natural state.
They don't like it when there's a forest fire burning, if you're doing a controlled burn.
So it's an awkward public relations issue.
So it seems like it's gotten pushed off to the side quite a bit, you know, in the hope that people will love seeing all these dense conifers.
But if you watch our video, you'll see that back in the day, and the information comes directly from a Parks Canada report or report for Parks Canada, you'll see that back in the day there was much more mixed vegetation, more deciduous trees, smaller shrubs and such like.
These were burned off in the early days of Jasper, probably around the 1913, I think it is, when it was called Fitzhugh.
There's a huge fire that just went all the way up and down that mountain parkway, if you like.
And that's why all these stands are pretty much the same, because it burned off a lot of that vegetation.
And since then, we haven't allowed the kind of wildfires that would restore that vegetation.
So now it's like all dense conifers, you know, very difficult to even navigate through these kinds of trees.
Yeah, the forest is all aging at once thanks to artificial fire suppression instead of controlled burns.
And there's something so ironic in all of this.
other side of this debate says that it is climate change causing the fires but it it really was the lack of global warming that caused the pine beetle to sort of be stopped in its tracks as it marched its way through our forest because pine beetle suffers winter kill after extended minus 40.
So we got extended minus 40 and that stopped the march of the pine beetle through the forest, but it didn't eliminate the deadfall.
I went through the timeline and I know you did a bit of it too.
So what we know for sure is in 2017, Conservative MP Jim McGlinsky, who was the MP there at the time, and the mayor of Jasper were warning.
That's 2017.
Then 2018, there's multiple experts coming out and saying their words were, it's just a matter of time.
Then in 2020, we've got Parks Canada officials testifying at the House of Commons, I think it was the Environment Committee, saying that there was a dangerous fuel load level in the park.
And then in 2022, Parks Canada's own report says that not enough was being done to clear out the fuel load.
And here we are, two years later.
And what the, it would have been inevitable if they had done more, I think, to eliminate the pine beetle.
But as you point out, the left has made it nearly impossible to cut a tree in this country.
And, you know, it's also not easy to do a controlled burn, especially in that Jasper area, because we were just talking before we went on air there.
Jasper's right in a basin of sort of three valleys.
The wind changes rather rapidly.
And, you know, it can get away on you.
And especially when you have all that dead wood all around that fuel load.
So it isn't easy to do a controlled burn.
But, you know, there are things that could be done, like logging companies could take all that dead wood out.
And there may be a way to turn it into something useful.
Like, for instance, you could burn it to make electricity.
I think Grand Prairie has a biomass plant.
You know, because it's not necessarily good for other things.
I don't know, maybe you can make it into kitty litter or wood pellets or something like that.
But what I'm saying is that get it out of there.
And the mechanical extraction, especially on the off seasons when A, there's not very many tourists around and B, the risk of actually lighting a fire because of the sparks or such like that might come from using mechanical tools in that environment would be less.
Again, in that area, I'm not an expert, but we do know that we have to get rid of as much of this fuel load as we can, especially when it's near these precious sites.
Apparently, Banff is also primed for such a tragedy.
And I will say, I saw, I think it was a Calgary Herald report about Banff and that they had actually closed off one of the streets downtown to make it into a pedestrian mall.
This is a kind of thing that happened in Paradise in California, where they decided to make their town a bit more quaint.
It used to have two lanes in and out.
So they shut down one of the lanes on each side to make it more pedestrian friendly.
And unfortunately, when that fire hit, people couldn't get out in their cars.
You know, you had one or two cars that stalled or burst into flames and there was no other path.
So, you know, you really have to take these unthinkable events seriously because they can happen.
You know, while you and I are considering practical ways to deal with the forest, environmental NGOs, they've already started banding together.
As you say, some 80 NGOs and health and civil society groups have issued an open letter to the federal government and provincial leaders in response to the Jasper Park fires.
You write that their demands are not for more water bombers, not for more firefighters or bucket scoopers.
They want the Canadian government to cap oil and gas emissions and block financing to fossil fuel producers.
Yeah, it's just so ludicrous.
I mean, first of all, how do you fight a wildfire without heavy equipment, without water bombers, without choppers, without the wildland firefighters?
How do you get them in and out of there safely?
How do you evacuate a town?
I mean, congratulations to Jasper and the emergency management people because they did such a great job of getting everybody out lickety split and safely.
Like it could have been much worse.
But how do you do that without fossil fuels?
You're going to run everybody out of town on an AV.
Are you kidding me?
You know, you can't run heavy equipment on batteries.
So you need diesel.
And that's how they're doing all the fire breaks.
You know, they send in a big dozer and take out, I don't know, a mile fire break.
It's a lot of work.
And we have another video actually about Yellowknife and how last year, when the wildfire was encroaching on Yellowknife, there was a skeleton crew of volunteers left behind.
And these guys jerry-rigged all kinds of water cannons and sprinklers to protect the town.
They cleared something like 40 acres of land in just a few days, you know, really like working around the clock.
But it's amazing what they did.
And I think everybody can maybe look at that and get an idea of what needs to be done.
It doesn't look very pretty, of course.
They just did it to protect the town.
But think of how you could do that for your community and do it in a, you know, a pretty way.
You could maybe have a walking trail around the town that's in a fire break, for instance.
You know, just you could do something that is functional, a fire break, and useful to the community, but you need to start doing it now and not when the fire is encroaching on your town.
Yeah, these environmental NGOs, where are they, by the way, when a fire hits a town?
They are squawking over here, but what are the oil and gas companies doing?
Lending equipment, throwing money at it.
They're giving their rig camps to the emergency services so that they can act as fire camps for the firefighters that are being flown in to fight it.
They are using their rig-moving trucks to they're pulling them off projects where they could be making money and giving them over so that they can move heavy equipment and rig camps in so that the firefighters can stay.
And what are the environmentalists doing?
Just running their mouths.
One of the Robbie Picard always makes a really great point when I talk to him about the fires in Fort McMurray.
And he said, the reason Fort McMurray, nearly 100,000 people, was able to be evacuated so quickly during the first fire with one fatality and that was a traffic accident on the highway is the close proximity to oil and gas in that community.
As in everybody has safety training.
Everybody knows how to evacuate.
Everybody knows to get to a muster point, to keep calm.
Vapor Pressure Deficit Debate00:05:45
Everybody is confined, almost everybody is can find space trained, H2S respirator trained.
Being in proximity to the oil and gas industry makes our communities so much safer.
Right.
And I'd say another thing about the ENGOs.
You know, one of the groups listed on here is Equitaire.
And you'll see this in our Conflations on Conflagrations video that we just put up about half an hour ago.
So Equitaire is a charitable status environmental group that was founded by Stephen Gilbo.
And it gets 41% of its revenues from government, in addition to being an ENGO.
So, you know, when you have these 80 groups here all nattering away about big oil and shutting down the industries that actually bring in revenues for Canada, maybe these guys should be offering to donate 10% of all the money that they have to these damaged communities like Jasper.
You know, they already have charitable status.
They're already taking tax subsidies from every single taxpaying Canadian.
But whenever there's a crisis, they never seem to step up with their volunteers or their money.
The same as what happened out in BC when the atmospheric rivers hit and all of the Sumas area was flooded.
You know, there's lots of big environmental groups out there.
I didn't see a huge campaign from them to get their volunteers out clearing the road or to put money together for the communities.
I mean, even the Jasper Food Bank, I just noticed this before I did the video.
The Jasper Food Bank had just shut down earlier this summer because they were trying to reorganize and they were unable to deal with the demand at the time.
And it used to be in the basement of the Anglican Church, which is so there's, you know, this is one of the vital services that needs to be restored.
So maybe, maybe these 80 groups could put together a food bank drive for Jasper rather than nattering on about climate change.
Maybe they could do something actually tangible, practical, and good for the community.
They talk here a lot about health.
Well, you know, the CAPE Doctors, the Canadian Association for Physicians for the Environment, are one of the signatories here.
Well, these guys have been funded by the McConnell Foundation for about half a million dollars to push climate change.
And they're the ones who are behind the Competition Bureau push to stop fossil fuel advertising because they were claiming that, you know, fossil ads make us sick.
Well, it's ludicrous.
You can't have modern medicine without fossil fuels.
You're going to be back on the kitchen table.
So, you know, they're really like misleading the public, and they're exploiting this tragedy of Jasper for their own proxy benefits for the green cronies who back them.
You know, it's really disgusting, actually.
Yeah.
I mean, they will not be around to help the people of Jasper rebuild in the same way that whenever a flood hits, you know, they're not the ones mucking out the basement.
They're the ones crying to the politicians.
And we know there are a lot of them involved.
If they need to block a street or have a celebration for Greta Thunberg down at the legislature, they come out by the thousands sometimes.
But to help actually their fellow man, even if they believe it's climate change, why wouldn't they do something tangible to help people rebuild?
They never, never do, never do.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's really ridiculous.
And also in one of the articles that they link in here, they claim that vapor pressure deficit is caused by big oil.
They make this as a scientific claim.
And this is sort of the hot, windy, dry ratio that's measured as to how flammable or how combustible a wildfire scenario is.
But it's kind of transient.
So it's mostly caused by sea surface temperature and atmospheric oscillations.
But these guys try to pin the blame on it's called VPD and short vapor pressure deficit.
So the vapor pressure deficit in Jasper was just fine right up until about the 1st of July.
And then it got super dry and very combustible.
In fact, to the point where our wildfire expert suggested that it might be that the park should have been closed.
That's how dangerous it was.
But, you know, you can't tell me that big oil was not responsible for the safe ratio of VPD running up to July the 1st, but was responsible for the extreme VPD after July the 1st.
It's just ludicrous.
So, you know, even the scientific references that they come up with are ridiculous.
And, you know, like when you asked them, like, what would be the tipping point?
What was the thing?
Was it me?
Did I fire up my, was I the tipping point?
I sparked up my jeep and then boop, that tipped us over from good to bad.
It had absolutely nothing to do with the atmospheric weather conditions in and around the region.
Mitigating Wildfires and Flooding00:06:27
I know that the, sorry, go ahead.
I was just going to say, I'm pretty sure that it was the COP conference in Bonn that did it.
You know, there's a pre-COP, there's about a thousand conferences, climate conferences that they have every year before the big conference of the parties in late fall.
So they had a big one in Bonn, and I'm pretty sure that's what tipped it over.
That'll do it.
It could have even been Dr. Joe Vipond of Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment fame going to the last climate change conference.
It could have been his flight.
I think that's his flight.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, I know that Stephen Gilbo, our environment minister and Parks Canada CEO, whose name is Casey right now, they make a big deal about Jasper being the first so-called fire smart community decades back.
And being fire smart, as I'm sure you'll explain better than me, is just a series of steps to make, not to fireproof your community.
I think that's nearly impossible, but to mitigate the speed at which a fire would rip through a community and to move, you know, debris away from buildings and combustibles away from buildings.
But that, and that may be true, but you cannot leave a stand of dead trees around the community and then simultaneously claim that you fireproof the community.
I mean, it's just impossible.
Yeah.
You know, we've been looking at some maps and Google Earth photos prior to the fire.
And it appears like there is a median that was full of dead trees, you know, which was on the approach to Jasper.
I don't know if that was cleared out.
It may have been an old photo.
There's also another patch just kind of across the highway from there, which was also looking all red and dead.
I don't know if that was cleared out.
You know, obviously those are areas where people would want to see trees, you know, as tourists.
But if that means your town is going to burn down, you better get rid of those trees and plant some new ones.
You know, and plant maybe some deciduous ones because they are a bit more fire resilient.
It's not what people, you know, if people are looking for the black forest kind of image, it's not what you're going to see, but maybe be safer.
I think Logan Lake is actually the best example of FireSmart.
FireSmart is a nationwide set of recommendations.
They are also split down by provinces because every province is a bit different.
You have different trees and different rules and regulations.
But in general, it gives people constructive practical tips for the community, for a homeowner, for a region, you know, how to fireproof your home, how to move debris away from your house, move trees back, how to put sprinklers on your roof.
I think that's where Logan Lake had real success.
And they worked very, very hard on it.
They saved their entire town and they were like surrounded by an enormous fire in BC.
But that story hardly gets headline news.
It hardly gets mentioned when there's a wildfire.
It's always, oh, no, climate change caused this.
And people may say, well, why are you mocking climate change?
Okay, let's say it has some elemental impact.
We have had some warming.
Most of it's in winter.
But, okay, let's say there is an element of it.
Look at it this way.
If we put $40 billion into an EV battery manufacturing plant in Ontario to stop climate change, but $32 million to BC for firefighting, don't you see some disparity there?
Because the problem with the climate change in Mantra is that all these green crony projects like wind farms, solar farms, flying cars, direct air carbon capture, carbon capture and storage, all these very expensive, not very practical, green-crony projects will take all the money when we need it for practical things, like clearing out the forest,
like better wildfire equipment, more water bombers, whatever the wildfire community tells us that we actually do need, let's listen to them and put the money there.
You know, rather than saying, oh, look at this, climate change is causing all kinds of financial burdens on Canadian society.
Well, because of wildfires and floods, it's the same with the Toronto floods.
Everyone went, oh, it's climate change.
No, it's not.
You can see our Toronto flooding video.
We've got all the information from Robert Muir, who's a professional engineer working in that area.
And you can see very clearly that there's no increase in precipitation, but there is an increase in population, and there is an increase in paving over.
And there's no significant increase in infrastructure to manage the water flows, both for public sanitation and both for flooding when there's a rain.
So, you know, we keep throwing money at the wrong thing and a lot of it.
You know, we're not talking about a few million that have gone to some climate project like tree planting.
We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars.
Yeah, well, Michelle, come on.
Practical solutions that would protect people's lives and property, that's going to make the green capitalists rich.
True.
And I use capitalists quite loosely because I don't know if you can actually be a capitalist if your business revolves around government subsidies.
That's right.
Well, you know, like with the McConnell Foundation funding CAPE, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, you know, it's interesting to note that McConnell has a $10 million investment in a BlackRock renewables fund.
So obviously, you know, you can make the connection that, well, hey, if CAPE is denigrating oil and gas, follow the money.
Yeah.
Spreading Truth on a Shoestring Budget00:03:56
Always, always follow the money.
Speaking of money, you guys don't have a lot at Friends of Science.
How's that for a segue?
But you really are, you really are just the little association that could, spreading the truth and trying to alleviate some of the fear and hysteria around climate change.
But you really do it on a shoestring budget.
You source actual scientists and engineers, which as we know, the left, the green left really doesn't like to do.
So tell us how people can get involved and help you, you know, stretch their dollar a little bit further to get the truth out there.
Thank you.
Well, we're not a charity, so we don't issue charitable receipts, but you can become a member.
It's $40 for one year and $80 for three years, and that will also get you our KLI Psi, which is about new climate information, or our extracts, which are snippets about things going on with the IPCC and all the climate conferences, things you probably wouldn't see in the mainstream news.
So $40 a year or $80 for three years, you can make a donation.
You can send us an e-transfer to contact at friendsofscience.org.
And, you know, if you aren't able to do that, you can also just share our materials and share them with whoever you think really needs to see them.
Not just send it to your social media with no purpose, but you can purposefully send them to people who you think really need to see it.
And that would be helpful because, you know, we are a very small organization in terms of human resources as well.
So we put the material out there.
We rely on the public to share it with whoever they think needs to see it.
Well, and I have to tell you, you put an incredible amount of work into the videos that you make.
They are a video, almost like a video PowerPoint where you take these big, purposefully complicated ideas.
I think they overcomplicate them so that normal people are just sort of overwhelmed with the jargon.
You cut right through it.
You go to the sources and you explain it to people in a way that not only can they understand, but they can digest it and take those arguments out into the world to debunk the hysterics around them.
So I really do appreciate that.
I cannot recommend your YouTube channel enough.
Long videos, short videos, there's something there for everybody.
Michelle, thanks so much for coming on the show.
And as always, cutting through the BS from the green left and the government, but I don't know if I need to make a distinction between those two groups.
Well, we've come to the portion of the show wherein I invite your viewer feedback because without you, there really is no rebel news or no gun show.
Unlike the mainstream media, I actually care about what you think about the work that we do, because if you don't support us or like us, well, we just disappear the way the mainstream media should, but won't, because they have all of your money thanks to Justin Trudeau.
So I give you my email address right now.
It's Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Gun show letters in the subject line so I know why you're emailing me because I get a ton of emails every day.
Not just every week, but every single day, day in, day out, 365 days of the year.
But also, maybe you are watching a clip of the show on YouTube or Rumble, leave a comment there, and I'll go looking over there sometimes.
Sometimes you guys are interesting or funny over there.
Every Day's a Gun Show00:04:48
I'll draw from that pool too.
But this week's gun show letter comes from the mailbag.
So, Sheila at RebelNews.com.
And it was on last week's show, which I filmed with my videographer, Kian Simone.
We were in Hinton, which is the next town to the east of Jasper, where it's the staging area for all the firefighting efforts.
And we were in the town to find out what the locals think about what happened in Jasper.
Did they believe it was a matter of time?
Spoiler alert, they did.
We also were, we wanted to show you what the town was like.
We showed you, you know, the police checkpoints.
We went on a little adventure trying to put a drone up, not into the national park because I realized that's illegal, but just to see what we could see.
We went to the command center so you could sort of see the firefighters working.
And then we talked to the locals.
And we also talked to an evacuee once we got back to Edmonton.
So we were there for a bit.
We got a lot of work done in the fewer than 48 hours that we were there on the ground.
And Mark sends me an email.
Mark writes, Hi, Sheila.
Jasper was one of my favorite places to visit.
I first visited Jasper in 2018 when I was hauling asphalt oil around Alberta, BC, and the territories.
Even though I was only staying on the highway, I immediately was awestruck at the beauty of Jasper.
So in 2019, I took a few days exploring, and my daughter loved the town site as I did.
We spent a day wandering around the town and even enjoyed some Jasper pizza.
We also visited Mayat Hot Springs and toured down the Ice Fields Parkway.
It was a trip I won't forget.
Now, back in 2018, I noticed all the dead trees from the pine beetle infestation and remarked, why not take those trees down and remove the fuel?
I'm sure logging companies in the area would have considered taking the trees or Parks Canada could have used the wood for their own campgrounds.
Definitely raises questions as to why they did nothing.
Is this negligence?
I think so.
Even removing a couple hundred feet of dead wood adjacent to the town on all sides could have, in my mind, prevented this disaster.
It also raises questions as this is the third Alberta town to catch fire in as little as 13 years.
I have my theories that this could be deliberate.
My heart breaks seeing the devastation on this favorite place of mine, and I only hope the residents can rebuild.
Thank you to Rebel News for covering this event and let's keep up the good fight.
Alberta Strong.
Thanks, Mark.
You know, Mark, if you want to donate to my 100% charitable crowdfund, you can make a donation at helpjasper.ca.
That will go to a charitable partner working on the ground to help the evacuees.
None of that money comes to Rebel News.
It's completely a charitable crowd fund.
But anybody who's visited Jasper in the last 10 years has seen those dead trees and thought, boy, they should probably do something about those.
Now, as to whether or not this is deliberate, I truly think it's a consequence of fire suppression in place of controlled burns.
We seem to be suppressing fire at all costs, and that leaves the forest all one age.
And a forest that's all one age burns all at once instead of allowing controlled burns so that you have a forest that has multiple ages.
And so a fire doesn't rip through everything.
They described it as a wall of fire going into Jasper.
And yeah, if you've been in Jasper, all the trees are the same height.
Everything is the same.
And that's worrisome.
And I think fire suppression.
to preserve nature is unnatural.
We should manage a fire, but we shouldn't be suppressing it at all costs because yes, Slave Lake, Fort McMurray, Fort McMurray again, now Jasper.
It's time we learn.
And to be fair, I think we're learning in Alberta.
I think we've learned.
But not Parks Canada.
I think they had chosen to preserve nature over people.
And now they have neither.
Okay, well, everybody, that's the show for today.
Thanks so much for tuning in.
Thanks to everybody who works behind the scenes at Rebel News to put the show together for me.
I think that's it.
We'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place, potentially.