Danielle Smith, exhibiting remarkably thin skin, demands apology from Town of Jasper for consultant’s critical report on 2024 fire

Sounds like Smith is getting more and more desperate every day. Maybe some chickens are coming home to roost?

Danielle Smith calling Jasper a “federal fire” is like Donald F tRump calling Covid “Kung Flu.”

Now that we’ve established where she’s coming from and how she intends to get there we may transition to reality by noting there’s considerable legitimate controversy about forest management in parks and, at the same time, may count-coup of discreditation that the only thing Smith could possibly be interested in is the controversy part and, of course, only because it’s down-rote predictable which side she’d be on.

In our Genesis-1:28-world, as the final phase of total globalization makes its deep-sea mining debut in the vast Clarion-Clipperton zone on the bottom of the mid-Pacific, it’s a wonder parks or nature preserves, exist at all. To the would-be subduers of the earth and masters of “every living thing that moveth upon” it, nature preserves are a “waste” of resources. Granted, park values are often “intangible” (in masterful subduerese that means, “not fungible cash”) and not so easily commodified as, say, logs or ore. Nonetheless, these are values appreciated by many citizens and visitors, of all walks of life and every politically partisan stripe and, thus, an example of political compromise between otherwise contending parties—just one of the values, a not-inconsiderable one, parks and nature preserves contribute to a happy, healthy society and ecosystem.

We may digress slightly in noting that the Smith government’s policy attitude towards preserving nature’s gifts of beauty, ecological health, and sustainable resource for hunters and gatherers is but one example of her psephological gormlessness in ignoring even her party’s own supporters, hitherto among the most stalwart, who are now vigorously protesting her plans to permit open-pit coal mining in Canada’s southern Rockies. Royalties would be paltry but the ecological damage to water quality —a vital factor on the dry, open prairie downstream—would be significant and probably permanent. Why a party which is already challenging longtime traditional conservatives’ support in a number of other ways would risk alienating one of the most traditionally conservative factions in southwest Alberta is truly questionable, and definitively careless or heedless—that is, gormless.

Parks are a huge tourist draw, even more-so after Covid inspired many to recreate outdoors: hiking, biking, rock-climbing, and camping equipment sales—and other “tangibles” are through the roof. At one time tourism was BC’s 2nd-largest industry next to forestry, and employed thousands of wildlife officials and spinoff hospitality workers. Nevertheless, the establishment and operation of parks often runs up against logging and mining interests, generating controversy which certain politicians avail for partisan purposes. Many are familiar with BC’s notorious “War in the Woods” but, perhaps most particularly because of BC’s mountainous terrain, mining interests which contended with preservationists were especially favoured by right-wing governments, either by way of compensation for nullifying existing mineral claims (when establishing Wells-Gray Provincial Park, for example) or by way of grandfathering existing mining operations inside new parks (Vancouver Island’s oldest and biggest park, Strathcona Park on the Big Island’s rugged mountain spine, still allows mining operations inside it’s boundaries). Loggers have long lusted after protected virgin timber—like the magnificent stands of Engelmann Spruce in the Coast Mountains’ Tweedsmuir Provincial Park. Logging has encroached on the periphery of many park boundaries.

The basic capitalistic complaint is that what can be profitably developed should be. The dying, late-80s Socred government sought to bridge a growing philosophical gap by developing a massive “blue paper” which recommended keeping parks but allowing private hospitality contractors to develop for-profit facilities within their boundaries, to invigilate park rules, &c. The Socreds governed BC for 38 of 41 years (a 3-year NDP term interceding ‘72-‘75) but were permanently terminated by Mike Harcourt’s NDP in 1991 before the their parks plan could be imposed. The NDP doubled the amount of preserved land and marine ecosystems which thence became the ideological target for the Socreds’ successor, Gordon Campbell’s BC Liberals, a market-fundamentalist party which defeated the ten-year incumbent NDP in 2001.

Campbell’s agenda was to render parks a liability, not only because he could make them money-losing ‘enterprises’ by laying off park officials, neglecting maintenance of trail and other tourist facilities, and installing pay-parking metres in park parking lots (a similar ploy to banning farm-gate sales in order to deem small farms on East Vancouver Island unprofitable and rationalize removing them from the Agricultural Land Reserve, presumably to convert them to profitable real estate development—that is, to change the ALR criteria from soil-potential to profit-potential). Intentionally bankrupting publicly-owned assets was his MO for privatizing them. Campbell wanted to privatize everything and that eventually led to his ouster in disgrace.

Campbell of course did everything by stealth, facilitated by the first of BC’s climate-related catastrophes, the mountain pine beetle outbreak of the late-80s which he and his successor, Christy Clark, could spin into ideological controversy handy for officially rationalizing intrusion into protected timber. And this was before wildfire became a perennial disaster over the next two decades. Foreshadowing tRump, he and she naturally blamed the NDP government of the 90s for the outbreak even though the policies and practices that led to the beetle-kill were in place before any of the contemporary NDP premiers was even born.

Parks are primarily intended to protect nature—and wildfire is natural. The controversy whether to allow nature to “take its course” in parks was ostensibly fuelled by loggers who considered not only the “waste” of burned timber inside parks, but argued that fire knows no boundaries and therefore wildfire inside parks threatened timber outside parks. The case is not without merit. However, ulterior motive was revealed by Christy Clark when she ruminated about allowing loggers into certain Interior provincial parks to “compensate them” for the “loss of lodgepole pine” to the vast beetle-kill, not to wildfire (that would soon come). Her balloon didn’t float long, however, because the dirty little secret was soon outed: nobody wanted to log the low-quality, low-value lodgepole pine, anyhow, which, after all, nature provided for free—so there was no “loss” to loggers, only a relentless lust for the higher-quality species—Doug fir, balsam fir, spruce and western larch—inside the parks targeted.

Lessons about fire haven’t necessarily been better learned by increasing the frequency and amplitude of devastation. That can be owed to the complexity of forest ecosystems, multiplied by that of climate change. In the beetle-kill context, the spruce bark beetle was already rampant in all-aged, mixed species stands in the Interior, and salvage was generating a lot of controversy (loggers using a small infestation to log a larger area than warranted, or collaterally logging nontargeted species). It was easy to confuse the totally different sylvics of the pine beetle which attacks single-species, single-aged stands like lodgepole (unlike spruce, pine is shade-intolerant). It is also perverse: because we suppressed wildfires for nearly a century, vast areas of pure, single-aged lodgepole pine which nobody really wanted grew into the age that pine beetles like best. Such vast areas of lodgepole would not exist in nature (fire would have sustained a patchwork of pine stands of different ages). Second, because of warming winters, fewer beetle larvae and overwintering adults are killed by cold. The perfect storm ensued: beetle populations exploded into the optimal age of lodgepole stands which were much more vast and contiguous than unmanaged stands would naturally be. The only thing natural about the devastation —the size of Vancouver Island!—was that, in BC’s highly contentious partisan atmosphere of the day, it became a political football long after the trees were dead and degraded to useless. And then to fuel for some of BC’s worst wildfire seasons.

Danielle Smith is not incorrect when she says municipalities need to better prepare for wildfire—although she says it for partisan reasons ulterior to facts. But the problem is exceedingly complex and presenting more ominously than previously predicted. She was talking about federalism, not wildfire—or even its impact on the human interface— and offered nothing helpful considering the report concluded provincial interference into a fire in a federal park was unhelpful. Indeed, she as good as promised her government would be happy to be as unhelpful if the situation should ever arise again.

She’s also correct that parks have a different mandate which doesn’t necessarily prioritize profitable tourism. Ideally parks managers manage people, not wildlife.
The controversy about allowing natural wildfire to take its course inside parks—a people, or political problem—is fraught and up against the call of the wild.

A question nobody would ever expect Smith to answer honestly is: what is nature? As a result of much more rapid climate change than anticipated we might conclude wildfire is nature’s way of clearing off ecosystems which are maladapted to whatever the climate is changing into. But Danielle is more ready to mix a little poop into the discussion than to find ways to effectively save property, life, and limb from wildfire.

These are definitely political problems that uber-partisan figures like Danielle Smith are ill-equipped to solve. It’s as plain as she seems to want it that her approach is ulteriorly motivated by a separatist agenda. But interfering with the fire boss’ essential chain of command is unforgivable on every level, partisan, political, patriotic and, most astoundingly, psephologically. If her petulant whining and perverse incompetence gets her party unelected, she and they will certainly deserve it.

Meanwhile, wildfire is coming. All governments need to go big or go home.

Your comment that Danielle Smith has a thin skin is a very nice and kind way of processing another idiotic explosion of an egocentric little Trumpian.
She is the truth and she knows everything.
An intelligent premier would read the report, analyze it and at most reply that she does not agree with it.
Of course, being an UCP she REQUESTS an apology. If that apology does not come she will find a revenge against the people involved. That is the way they operate, just like 4 year old in kindergarten.