Senate wildfire report flags NWT gaps, urges national fleet

A new Senate report on Canada’s worsening wildfires calls for a national fleet of firefighting aircraft, a federal coordinating office and far more support for Indigenous-led firefighting.

The report, made public on Wednesday, also points to the Northwest Territories as a case study in what can go wrong.

The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry made 15 recommendations after a series of record-breaking fire seasons.

The committee urged Ottawa to pre-position aircraft and retardant across the country, build up Indigenous firefighting crews, and fund mental health support before, during and after evacuations.

Forests should be considered a “strategic national asset” by the federal government, the report stated, and a federal coordinating office for wildfires should be created that replicates similar offices in the United States, Australia and elsewhere. That office, senators added, should include Indigenous voices.

Ken McMullen – president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, who joined three senators to present the report in Ottawa on Wednesday – said Canada is the only G7 country without a national office overseeing fire policy.

The report’s highest-profile recommendation is a national, federally funded fleet of modern water bombers and other aircraft, kept in working order, staffed with trained pilots and strategically positioned around the country to back up provinces and territories each summer.

Other recommendations call for a national wildfire hazard-mapping program, a national reforestation policy, stronger financial support for farmers after fires, and changes to the National Building Code to make new homes more fire-resistant.

The committee’s final recommendation is blunt: governments “must move at the speed of the crisis.”

Fort Good Hope case study

The NWT looms large in the evidence.

In 2023, about 3.5 million hectares burned in the territory – second only to Quebec – and the entire city of Yellowknife was evacuated, part of a record season that displaced more than 230,000 people across Canada. A dozen NWT communities faced some form of evacuation that summer.

Fort Good Hope’s story from the following year forms a key anchor of the Senate committee report.

Presenting the report on Wednesday, Senator John McNair – the committee’s deputy chair – singled out the community and Alberta’s Little Red River Cree Nation as places that fought fires with the resources they had and “saved many homes that otherwise might have been lost.”

Earlier, the committee had heard testimony from Chief Collin Pierrot about how Fort Good Hope fought a June 2024 fire. The final report quotes extensively from his evidence.

Chief Pierrot told the Senate committee Fort Good Hope had used two water trucks and a fire truck to tackle the wildfire after finding almost no equipment at the local Department of Environment and Climate Change base except “maybe five bags of hoses.”

Pierrot said air tankers sent to help flew to Norman Wells to load retardant, found none there, and had to fly about two and a half hours back to Yellowknife to mix it – burning through an eight-hour flying limit, as he put it, on a single retardant drop.

Darcy Edgi, of the K’ahsho Got’ine Foundation, told senators the community saved itself by fighting the fire directly rather than waiting for help. Many adult residents were former firefighters who knew how to help, Pierrot said.

Giving evidence in late 2024, Pierrot also alleged the community had received no trauma or mental health support after the fire, despite appealing for that form of assistance.

Funding gap

A senior federal official told the committee the territory’s structure created a further problem.

Wayne Walsh, of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, said that because the NWT has only two reserves, most of its Indigenous communities did not directly qualify for Ottawa’s main on-reserve disaster programs – the Emergency Management Assistance Program and Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements. Instead, that money flowed through the territorial government.

While many NWT communities are used to the concept of federal funding reaching them via the GNWT, there are sectors such as housing in which that is changing, and more money is heading directly from Ottawa to Indigenous governments.

The Senate committee report characterized the complexities of disaster funding distribution in the NWT as one of “many barriers that Indigenous communities face before, during and after wildfire emergencies.”

The report’s 15 recommendations do not, however, directly address whether and how that should change.