Late Summer — August/September 2026
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Sustainable Simcoe North

When The Smoke Comes For Us All

— by Madeleine Fournier of Green Orillia

I’ve been seeing this quote circulating on social media: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones, with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”

That felt increasingly real this week. At the time of writing, 148 wildfires are burning across Northwestern Ontario. Six communities have been evacuated, five of them First Nations: Collins (Namaygoosisagagun) First Nation, Lac La Croix First Nation, Whitesand First Nation, Gull Bay First Nation, Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation, and Armstrong. Families fleeing for their lives, homes wiped out, and communities left displaced for months.

 

This summer I’m living in Toronto, finishing my Master’s in Environmental Studies while working as an urban farmworker. On Wednesday morning I woke up to orange skies and the worst ranked air quality in the world. There’s something deeply surreal about ecological farming in a climate emergency, growing food in a KN95 mask while the air itself has become hazardous to breathe.

 

It raises an unavoidable question: how did we get here? This is the predictable consequence of an economy built on burning fossil fuels. The resulting climate crisis is making Canada’s wildfire seasons longer, hotter and more destructive. Warmer temperatures dry out forests, create longer periods of extreme fire weather and increase the likelihood of lightning ignitions.

 

In addition, for years Ontario has underinvested in wildfire preparedness relative to the scale of the problem. The province allocated $135 million to its Emergency Forest Firefighting program in the 2025 budget – an amount that representatives from the Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs say is basically just enough to keep the lights on. Ontario ended up spending over double that amount last year fighting forest fires, and still we have not seen the 2026 budget increase.

 

We continue to spend enormous sums responding to disasters after they begin, while investing little in preventing them (I’m looking at our Simcoe North MPP and Minister of Emergency Preparedness and Response, Jill Dunlop). This prevention should include something governments have spent generations trying to eliminate: Indigenous fire stewardship. Long before Canada existed, Indigenous nations managed forests through cultural and prescribed burning. These carefully planned, low-intensity fires reduced fuel loads, protected ecosystems, encouraged biodiversity and lowered the risk of catastrophic wildfires. Colonial governments viewed these practices not as sophisticated land management but as obstacles to settlement and cultural burning was discouraged and prohibited in many cases. See Blazing the Trail for more on Indigenous Fire Stewardship.

 

Indigenous leaders, firefighters and researchers have been calling for greater investment in Indigenous-led emergency management, prescribed burning, early warning systems and community preparedness. Because this crisis is not experienced equally: First Nations account for a disproportionate number of wildfire evacuations in Canada. Many reserves are located in remote, heavily forested regions where wildfire risk is inherently higher. Decades of underinvestment in infrastructure and emergency services mean some communities can only be reached by aircraft, boat, or seasonal roads. When fire approaches, evacuation often becomes a race against time.

 

As journalist Tanya Talaga reported, this past week Namaygoosisagagun First Nation Chief Helen Paavola repeatedly contacted Ontario officials as wildfire closed in on her community. She was told not to worry and that someone would come. No one did. The evacuation warning ultimately came not from the province, but from a CN Rail employee who saw the fire approaching and called the Chief directly. Community members then rescued one another by boat through smoke and flames. As Chief Paavola said afterward, “Their evacuation was done without any provincial or federal help. It was done with their own bravery.”

 

The same questions about how we got here arise in how we manage forests themselves. Each year, forestry companies spray thousands of hectares of Crown land with glyphosate to suppress deciduous vegetation and encourage commercially valuable conifer species. Critics argue this approach reduces biodiversity and may create forests that are more susceptible to severe wildfire by favouring highly flammable conifers over more fire-resistant deciduous species such as aspen.

 

Meanwhile, Canada’s political leaders continue to champion fossil fuel expansion. The premiers of Alberta and Ontario unveiled a proposed 3,300 km pipeline to transport oil from Western Canada to refineries in southern Ontario, while Prime Minister Mark Carney is approving other new pipelines and has publicly admitted that because of policy changes he has made, Canada’s “emissions will be higher in the next few years than they were projected to be under the previous government’s plan.” At the same time, the federal government continues to receive extensive lobbying from oil and gas companies while signing major contracts and subsidies tied to resource development. When governments are deeply invested in the same industries driving emissions growth, it is nearly impossible to believe they will take the scale of action this crisis demands.

 

For too long, Indigenous communities have been on the frontlines of climate change while governments ignored Indigenous knowledge, underfunded emergency preparedness and delayed meaningful climate action by facilitating an equitable renewable energy transition. Now the smoke has reached the rest of us. The conditions we allow in one place will inevitably reach everyone else.

 

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Green Orillia is a grassroots organization focused on climate action, social justice, advocacy, education, democracy, and community resilience in Orillia and area. We operate on Anishinaabeg Williams Treaty Territory. Follow Green Orillia on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, join the Facebook Discussion Group, sign up for the e-newsletter, or check out the website. Get in touch at greenorillia@gmail.com.

 

PHOTO CREDIT Second photo is by Lyndon Tyler (@lyndo.tyler on Instagram)