It’s time to move from reaction to building resilience
By Kate Lindsay, Senior Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer, Forest Products Association of Canada
Canada’s wildfire seasons are no longer episodic shocks. They are systemic and growing more costly with every passing year. Leading wildfire experts who are changing how we think about wildfire science, Indigenous fire stewardship, forest management, and emergency preparedness clearly underscored that new reality during a recent FPAC policy webinar.
What stood out from this event was the degree of alignment around one central truth: Canada already has strong provincial wildfire systems. The federal role is not to replicate them, but to enable them to work better, faster, and at scale.
Five key lessons from the event point to a clear conclusion: policy must evolve from reacting to wildfire disasters to building long-term wildfire resilience.
1. Wildfire is a national resilience issue.
Wildfire is no longer a seasonal or environmental issue.
Provinces, territories, and Indigenous Peoples rightly lead wildfire management on the ground; however, the consequences of severe wildfire extend far beyond what individual provinces and communities can reasonably manage. Smoke affects national health systems, fires disrupt interprovincial supply chains and critical infrastructure, and insurance and economic impacts ripple across the country.
This makes wildfire resilience a clear federal interest: federal policy choices in infrastructure, health, housing, climate adaptation, and emergency preparedness directly shape wildfire outcomes. Applying a national climate resilience lens to all federal policy frameworks is essential, even when delivery remains regional and local.
2. Suppression-first approaches have created today’s wildfire risk
Canada’s current wildfire challenge is not simply the product of climate change. Decades of suppression first approaches (e.g. striving to put out all wildfires) have contributed to today’s fuel loaded landscapes and high severity fires. Changing that reality requires strategic active forest management, targeted fuel treatment, and informed land use decisions that only provinces, territories, Indigenous governments, federal agencies (e.g. Parks Canada) and local authorities can implement. Suppression will continue to be an important approach, but shifting the balance of funding and capacity to proactive mitigation and prevention for whole-of-society is the goal over time.
The federal government’s role is to create enabling conditions: removing policy barriers, aligning incentives, and supporting the shift from suppression to risk reduction without undermining provincial authority. When federal policy conflicts with or complicates provincial systems, it slows progress rather than accelerating it.
3. Prevention and mitigation deliver strong economic returns—but only if scaled.
The economics are clear: prevention and mitigation save far more than they cost. Fire Smart treatments, landscape level fuel reduction, and risk based planning all reduce losses and improve safety. But these measures require continuity—something short term or ad hoc funding cannot provide.
Here the federal role is straightforward and powerful: stable, multi year funding frameworks for wildfire prevention and mitigation that flow through and strengthen provincial / territorial and Indigenous led systems, rather than bypassing them. Predictable federal investment enables provinces to build workforce capacity, maintain treatments over time, and move beyond pilots to true scale. Evidence consistently shows that every dollar invested in wildfire mitigation saves multiple dollars in response and recovery.
4. Indigenous fire stewardship is essential to effective wildfire management.
Indigenous fire stewardship is foundational to long term wildfire resilience. Indigenous governments and practitioners are best positioned to design and deliver this work, based on place based knowledge and cultural practice.
Federal leadership matters by addressing cross cutting barriers—liability, insurance, workforce continuity, and sustained funding—that Indigenous communities cannot resolve alone. The federal role is to enable Indigenous leadership, not to prescribe it, and to ensure Indigenous fire stewardship is treated as core climate adaptation and public safety infrastructure.
5. Canada has the tools to act—the gap is implementation.
Canada already has world class data, predictive fire modelling, fuel hazard mapping, and research capacity. Increasingly, provinces and practitioners know where and how to act. What holds implementation back is fragmented policy alignment across federal departments and programs.
Federal leadership can close this gap by focusing on coordination rather than control: aligning national building codes for wildfire resilient construction, ensuring open and interoperable data systems, supporting applied research tied to implementation, and designing policies that reinforce—not complicate—provincial, territorial and Indigenous government-led action.
From duplication to enablement
The question facing Canada is no longer whether the science and knowledge exist in society to understand wildfire risk. We do. The question is whether federal policy will consistently enable those closest to the land to act at the scale and the speed that wildfire risk now demands.
Wildfire risk is shaped by how we manage forests, where we build, and what we invest in before disaster strikes. Provinces, territories, and Indigenous governments must lead implementation. The federal government’s role is to enable that leadership—through stable, multi‑year funding, supportive policy frameworks, and national coordination where it adds value, not friction.
That is why FPAC is calling on the federal government to make wildfire prevention and mitigation a core pillar of Canada’s climate adaptation and public safety strategy—focused squarely on enabling provinces, territories, and Indigenous partners through long-term funding, supportive policy alignment, and the removal of barriers to proactive forest management and community-led fuel treatment.
The cost of inaction rises every year. The cost of prevention is known—and far lower. Canada’s choice should be clear.
Watch:
• Policy Webinar: Shared Risk, Shared Solutions: The Future of Wildfire
Read:
• How Canada's Forest Sector Can Support Wildfire Resilience
• We Grow to Build Canada: A Forest Sector Action Plan
About FPAC
FPAC provides a voice for Canada’s wood, pulp, and paper producers nationally and internationally in government, trade, and environmental affairs. As an industry, we contributed $19.9B in real GDP in 2025.
Canada's forest products sector is one of the country’s largest employers—providing nearly 200,000 direct jobs and operating in hundreds of communities across the country. Our members are committed to collaborating with Indigenous leaders, government bodies, and other key stakeholders to develop across-Canada action plan aimed at advancing forest health, while supporting workers, communities and our environment for the long term.
