Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government will do anything to own the Libs – even if they have to burn your house down to do it!
That at least is an inference that can be drawn from a 57-page report commissioned by the Town of Jasper and released yesterday that concludes the Alberta government made things worse when its officials kept interfering with the efforts by Parks Canada and the Town of Jasper to control the mighty forest fire that roared through the mountain resort on July 22 last year, destroying about a third of its structures.
In all, about 800 houses and apartments were destroyed in addition to commercial and community buildings. More than 25,000 residents and visitors were forced to flee the rapidly advancing wall of flames.
Whereas “the response to the Jasper Wildfire Complex demonstrated the effectiveness of the strong Unified Command established by the Municipality of Jasper and Parks Canada,” said the after-action report based on a survey of firefighters and officials, “provincial involvement added complexity to the response as the Province of Alberta, though not jurisdictionally responsible to lead the incident, regularly requested information and sought to exercise decision-making authority.”
“Jurisdictional overlap with the province created political challenges that disrupted the focus of incident commanders, leading to time spent managing inquiries and issues instead of directing the wildfire response and re-entry,” said the report, which is posted on the Town of Jasper’s Website.
The report “is not intended to ascribe blame,” said a news release from the town. “By sharing our experiences now, we hope to contribute to the growing body of knowledge that supports better planning, stronger partnerships, and more resilient communities across Alberta,” said Jasper Chief Administrative Officer Bill Given in the release.
While politely worded and largely focused on the positive, the report also noted that the Alberta Emergency Management Agency seems to have made things worse. “Inefficiencies in signing in, tracking and checking out resources … resulted in a lack of awareness regarding resource availability and location, which contributed to confusion, increased safety risks and hindered effective allocation of resources.”
Of course they did. As was obvious at the time, the Alberta Government was focused on what really mattered to the United Conservative Party in a catastrophic emergency: Making the Liberal Government in Ottawa look bad in the lead-up to a federal election.
Nowhere in the report does the word “grandstanding” appear, but readers may recall Premier Danielle Smith, Forestry Minister Todd Loewen and Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis showing up for a news conference all togged out in cool emergency garb.
Then there was Ms. Smith’s carping about Parks Canada’s approach to fire management in the aftermath of the catastrophe and her suggestion that the province could do it better by paying loggers to clear firebreaks and letting ranchers graze cattle in the parks to keep the breaks clear.
She told her free CORUS Radio show on July 27, “There’s no reason why we can’t say, ‘Hey, guess what? Can you prioritize cutting here? Can you prioritize building fire breaks in this way?’ Once we’ve built the fire break, can we use it, either by having cattle on there to graze it, so that it stays, uh, capped, so that’s it’s managed year after year?
“Those are all things that we’ll be doing with our own forest management areas,” she said, “and then hoping to apply some of those lessons federally.”
During the same show, Ms. Smith broached the possibility of Alberta taking over national parks within the province’s borders, supposedly as a joke that didn’t really sound like a joke.
When she and Mr. Loewen first met then federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, she claimed during her monologue, she asked her sidekick, “‘Did you talk to Minister Guilbeault yet about how we’re gonna be takin’ back the national parks?’ I laughed. He didn’t.”
“It was a joke at the time,” Ms. Smith rambled on, “but I can tell you that I think we have the capacity and the on-the-ground ability to respond in a way that should be more unified. If that requires us to be a bit more assertive in trying to change some of the rules around how they manage their parks, how they manage the prescribed burns, how they manage the cuts. I do know we’ll be very, very active in pressing that along.”
Yesterday’s after-action report makes it sound as if Alberta being “a bit more assertive” is precisely what’s not needed.
The UCP’s blame-Ottawa game was still continuing six months later, and they’ll probably be at it again today. Leastways, The Canadian Press reported that a spokesperson for Mr. Ellis, who is responsible for overseeing the Emergency Management Agency, said they’re hard at work on a response.
Alberta loses its shit anytime Ottawa even hints at getting involved in provincial affairs — but here they were sticking their noses into the management of an emergency inside a NATIONAL PARK! Hypocrisy much, Daniellezebub?
As an aside, I’ve known Bill Given for at least 20 years. He’s a former City Councillor and later Mayor of the City of Grande Prairie, and a one-time “independent conservative” candidate in a federal election. He’s no stranger to the municipal-provincial-federal jurisdictional dance that is Canada.
The important thing here is that Marlaina, Ellis and Loewen got to play dress up and show off their new costumes.
Love it!
I can’t get no satisfaction.
Sadly, this is not surprising to any Albertan who is awake.
Yes this seems about right. From what I recall at the time the UCP and Smith were second guessing everything the Feds did and constantly criticizing them. Sometimes in a provocative way that could be called picking fights, like the aggressive joking, not joking approach about taking over running things from the Feds.
Of course all of this is not helpful when trying to deal with a disaster. No doubt the UCP became quite a pain for those whose priority it was to actually try deal with the real and urgent problems of this emergency.
I suppose this report is a fairly polite way to say all this. Normally it would be quite embarrassing for a governments actions to be described like this. However, I don’t feel Smith and her gang are capable of feeling regret or shame about any of their actions. So I doubt they will learn anything from this, but I hope others will.
Alberta would love to take over the national parks. In no time at all she would have the parks looking like Niagara Falls with nothing but souvenir shops and cheesy gimmicks. I wonder if Smith considers it a burden or a blessing always being the smartest person in the room.
Smith managing to foul up the Jasper fire so badly, how on earth could she ever run an independent province? Perhaps as Mr. C. suggested, her end game is to hand over the province to the U.S. and act as pro counsel.
“The smartest person in the room”: yep a one holler in the wilderness!
I remember getting an “oh-oh” sense during the Jasper fires when Smith was proselytizing/musing or whatever-that-thing-is-she-does when she was talking about what she would do if she was in charge of the fire response. As always, an expert on everything, she was tossing around a little jargon here and there making it sound like she knew what she was talking about. The old “bullshit baffles brains” routine. I said a little prayer for the people and the wildlife of Jasper.
Smith’s competence, as with her servile and inept cabinet ministers in any kind of emergency response, ends with the little outfits they pose in. If she ever has a presser regarding Measles is she going to show up wearing a stethoscope slung around her neck? Just pull it out of her dress-up box.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see the parallel with what is happening with the Measles raging through Alberta, as Dr. James Talbot astutely observed when he was quoted by the Tyee on July 9.
“We have a situation basically in which the province wasn’t properly prepared or led and which has slow walked virtually everything. If they had had this kind of response to the forest fires in Alberta — that same kind of slow don’t worry about it and you know this is all individual choice — the province would be a smoking ruin by now.”
Well put.
Not exactly the Nuremberg Rally, but it’s working that way.
As with everything else she will blame the Libs, NDP and maybe even Smokey the Bear in no particular order.
It’s the sasquatch’s fault.
Taking back the national parks? Actually, Banff National Park existed before Alberta became a province. Let us not forget for the millionth time that Alberta did not join Confederation. Rather, it was created by Canada from the North-West Territories in 1905. If anyone is taking back anything, surely Banff is entitled to take back Alberta. Forget about Banff becoming part of the US-Alberta Territory in the upcoming annexation, Ms. Smith. It is not yours to steal.
As we should understand by now, Smith and her cosplay crew are more interested in being agents of chaos than working to resolve crises in this province. They disrupt, they interfere, they dress up like children pretending to be grown-ups with real jobs. They blame, they smear, they know better than all the experts. They insert themselves where they don’t belong, when anyone with half a brain would know that the best thing to do is stay out of the way. Grandstanding? More like peak narcissism on display for all to see. Narcissists must always be the centre of attention. They have no substance and nothing useful to contribute because they won’t do the hard work. They won’t work at all. They stomp their feet a lot, like unruly children having a temper tantrum. That is all. They must create a lot of ill will with all their theatrics. They have an unnatural ability to turn allies into enemies. Surely there are future consequences.
I am with you.
After Smith provided the lie that Jasper was a National Park and they could not help fight the fire a helicopter pilot from Hinton pointed out that it was a lie and they were fighting it as soon as possible. Lying is her best qualification isn’t it?
What do we do in light of UCP misconduct? How shall we react to this government’s unprofessionalism?
Write and phone your MLA, premier and environment ministers – express your anger. Remind them your vote is not theirs by default.
Be sure to talk to neighbours about the UCP’s mismanagement.
Perhaps go to Alberta Next and share a critique of their proposed policies using their actions around the Jasper fire as evidence of their incompetence and ideological idiocy.
Put up election signs, donate to the ABNDP, and vote to turf these current gov fools.
Or not. Then “economy-over-climatel, fear based, tribal-populist politics will keep making all our lives so very much worse.
Since Ellis, Smith and Loewen love cosplay so much, and Smith thinks she can better manage the national parks than the experts at Parks Canada, all three of them can go fight the next big fire. Literally. They can get dressed up in their pretty emergency costumes and join the real firefighters in the heat and the flames and all that other unlovely stuff. That ought to smoke the smarminess out of them. But seriously, how does Smith find the time away from her duties as vaccination expert and epidemiologist to lend her expertise to managing national parks? She certainly is a jack(ass) of all trades, isn’t she?
Bingo!
Remember the 2013 Calgary flood? Redford and Nenshi dressed like normal people, Harper wore a military jacket with wings and was criticized for it. It looked like he wanted to resemble George Bush in a plane looking down at the effects of Hurricane Katrina.
https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/stephen-harpers-military-jacket-is-irritating-and-offensive_b_3510607
Are the UCP still withholding the millions of dollars they promised to support rehoming those Albertans in Jasper because the local authorities would not kowtow to the provincial demand for the least efficient and cost effective method of rehoming people? ‘Cause Gov. Smith really does know best.
Having spent 28 years of my life in wildland fire management— the majority with the Government of Alberta, I have the following observations.
1. After action reviews are meant to assist wildfire management agencies with improvement. This was not blaming Alberta and our elected officials—it was an observation and a suggestion for improvement. I’ve witnessed political involvement with wildfire incident management teams and it does drag teams and wildfire response into inefficiency. I can only imagine the asinine questions Smith, Lowen et. al were asking.
2. National parks have a different mandate than Alberta Crown Land. For Premier Smith to suggest that Parks Canada engage in more aggressive “forest management” is simplistic and uninformed. There was significant “forest management” completed around Ft. Mac and Slave Lake. These treatments were signed as as Fuel Management Treatments. Mysteriously, the signs disappeared once fire ripped through the fuel treatments and burned homes down.
3. We are well beyond the state where forest management will make a significant difference. Climate, drought, insects and tree diseases have taken hold of our forests. Thinning, pruning, commercial harvest only go so far. We need to address climate change seriously.
4. People in Jasper lost their homes. Maybe the premier and her cabinet could show some awareness, kindness and not make everything political.
The Dani has done jumped the shark! She wants Jasper to apologize for burning to the ground? OK baby!
POGO: The worse Donny gets, the worse Dani gets. DJC
Mike Ellis and Todd Loewen testified to a federal committee last October:
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/alberta-slams-unified-command-snub-jasper-wildfire
But the report said the municipal and feds had been doing exercises to prepare for a fire. So did the province not take part in any such exercises? Were they ever invited to take part in exercises or just ignored?
More testimony by AB ministers and a private company that was trying to help fight the fire:
https://globalnews.ca/news/10801360/jasper-national-park-alberta-wildfire-parliamentary-committee/
I wonder if this is the main cause of the confusion, that the province thought they could just insert private firefighters without any warning or practice?
….but, but, she cried! That makes her so sincere and concerned.
Honestly, if I didn’t distrust her so much, I could marvel at how she can spin everything to make herself and her cohorts the victim and everyone else the villain.
As an aside, I believe Jasper was the only polling station in West Yellowhead to vote predominately NDP in the last election. Hmm!
On how they voted, you’re almost 100% correct. I checked out Elections Alberta on that point.
Electoral District 87, West Yellowhead:
– Poll #10, Jasper Activity Centre: NDP 637, UCP 184
– Poll #28, Jasper Advance Poll: NDP 732, UCP 132
Oh, and one poll in Grande Cache also went NDP: Mobile poll #19 (Grande Cache Community Health Centre & Whispering Pines Lodge): NDP 8, UCP 3. That’s seniors in continuing care facilities voting NDP.
http://www.elections.ab.ca/election-results/
One more – all the five committee hearings about Jasper fire are linked here:
https://www.ourcommons.ca/Committees/en/ENVI/StudyActivity?studyActivityId=12875113
I spent better part of a summer falling trees for a utility arborist contractor along the high-voltage transmission corridor that crosses the height of land between the headwaters of the Elk and Kananaskis valleys. We stayed at an inhospitable “man-camp”, or maze of modular bunkhouses on the outskirts of Elkford, BC, but during our week off between 21-day shifts I often rode my Yamaha 650 over the continental divide and stayed at the nascent site of the Winter Olympics ski village where my old buddy was working as a pipe-fitter on an Olympic-sized sewage plant and stayed as watchman between shifts on his own three-and-one schedule.
His 5th-wheel was the only structure there except for a couple of metal shipping containers and sheds for stacks of plate steel and equipment to make any kind of gigantic flange or bracket out of it. A huge golf course had just been terraformed in the wide open, almost treeless alpine. It was great: we’d roar down to Pincher Creek, “Easy Rider” style for the odd restaurant meal and to restock essential beverages, roar back and practice cutting and welding at our leisure (made some pretty goofy little wood stoves), nobody around—except for this strange fella who manned the fire-lookout on the nearby mountain. We could see him with binoculars looking back down at us with his own binoculars.
One of the things that struck me was how fast the summer weather can change in the Rockies —that a couple hailstones, one leaving a sizeable dent in my gas tank, another a bruise on my shoulder as we rushed to get a sheet of plywood over our bikes—and our helmets on. The other was that lightning actually does strike twice in the same place: many’s the evening we’d watch the lookout tower get zapped over and over again. The strange fella who manned it appeared afoot in our camp one afternoon, declined a cold beer, told us how lonely it was up there and that he had to start hiking back before nightfall—several hours away—because he didn’t like climbing the long, steep ladder-stairs in the dark. His back stiffened when we asked what it’s like when lightning hits the tower, his parting whisper was simply, “It’s horrifying,” leaving us a little creeped-out as he trudged away over the tundra, back to his lonely tower.
In retrospect, what seemed weird in my 20s pales, nearly a half century later, in comparison to “They’re eating the dogs!” and “They sweep the forest floor.” Not necessarily for the amplitude of absurdity but more for its utter pervasiveness. Blowing smoke at partisan rivals to blame them for acts of nature like forest fires was at one time not supposed disrespect sovereign borders like viral epidemics do. But it’s all different now. In pure große Lüge fashion, Donald F tRump blames everything imaginable on a single enemy, not necessarily to absolve himself —the demigod of demagogues sincerely believes he’s justified in withholding emergency federal aid to states which didn’t vote for him —but instead to slander, discredit, or threaten his critics like California Governor Gavin Newson—or “Newscum”, as tRump childishly calls him: when whole neighbourhoods and towns in California are razed by wildfire and citizens killed, tRump seizes the opportunity to slag Newsom’s alleged forest “mismanagement” because, he alleges —as if qualified—, Californian doesn’t “sweep the forest floor”, or rake up the leaves like, he says, they do in Europe—where, btw, he doesn’t acknowledge that forests fires are also a new and worrying result of human-caused global warming. But if there’s one thing tRump does know, it’s that not-knowing in the Information Age is a powerful tool.
In other environmental-disaster news, tRump one-ups Newsom by abusing presiduncial powers, deploying his RoyCohn-Ray, and affecting churlish Monty Burns grandstanding he learned from watching The Simpsons™. We know it spreads across the world’s most osmotic international border, from higher to lower concentration, so when Red State governors ape their master and blame Canada’s forest management practices for wildfire smoke and Canadians—many of whom don’t vacation in the US anymore—for ruining their states’ summer, we know that partisan blaming for random lightning strikes will be featured in the Canadianized version up here, north of the border, and upon what small stage it will most likely be performed to Alberta’s audience of 5 million (a modest 1.4% of the USA’s 340 million). It drifts not upon the winds of climate-change but on the flatus-earth network of MAGA dysangelists who, despite their professed creationism, deftly avail the internet to broadcast the incantations of their scapegoater-in-chief, the society-mangling electronic facility owed completely to the very science which refutes their adamant Biblical literalism.
The sun rises over the gable end of my neighbours carport about 20 feet to the southwest of my living room window, the finest particulates thus illuminated against a deep black background —the finest mist, the tiniest spores and pollen grains, and even smoke in which, so-illuminated, I can see individual particles of soot when occasional wildfire smoke from Alberta blows out to the West Coast hundreds of miles away. I can tell by its colour how far it has come or if it was cooled by overnight temperatures (it becomes redder the older and more weathered it gets). It hurts my lungs to breathe it so I stay indoors by my air purifier until, in a few days or weeks, it dissipates. We can get wildfire smoke from the Big Island to the north and west, from California, Oregon, and Washington to the south, and from the BC Interior between us and Alberta. But knowing that most wildfires are started by lightning strikes, it never occurs to me to blame the source jurisdictions for the toxic smog.
I still call Thursday “Thor’s Day” to remind of our pagan heritage but I understand that the god of thunder is a mythological figure and that forest fires do not result from him aiming his lightning bolts for some conspiratorial reason —like MTG’s “Jewish space lasers”.
The majority of people are urban dwellers who know relatively little about forests so it’s no surprise the Orange Dunning-Kruger poster-boy knows even less. Even if it were possible to sweep the forest floor, tRump is deporting the only people who would be willing to undertake even a tiny fraction of such a vast implication. The Big Lie doesn’t need to make sense so the fact that wildfires don’t need forest-floor litter to candle from tree to tree for miles and miles is irrelevant to große Lüge practitioners. Danielle Smith would also neglect to account for burning embers blown in the wind which jump firebreaks —unless, naturally, she could blame the wind on the federal Liberals. She talks as if the feds don’t maintain firebreaks with cattle. Cattle!—in National Park! Now, there’s a sop to her MAGA North audience! In fact, cattle don’t eat tree seedlings so maintaining a vegetation-free firebreak does require human workers to cut down infilling tree growth. (She should actually ask some real ranchers about free-ranging cattle stepping on a one-inch diameter fir or pine stump that becomes proud when organic soils shrink back in the summer.)
Of course the post-Jasper fire report is bound to tell the truth: hindering fire suppression where the hierarchy from fire-boss down to man on the shovel is carefully designed to be as directly real-time as possible is downright dangerous. Incompetence is one thing, but doing it for the sole purpose of somehow showing up the feds is perfidious.
If the UCP government is willing to do that, when property, life and limb is on the line in an emerging crisis, how reticent will it be to interfere with, say, a secession referendum it wants to win for its Big Bitumen master’s sake even though the majority of Albertans and Canadians don’t want Alberta to seceded? For the answer, look to the south whence ill winds will fill the air with the stench of MAGA example.
It was a federal fire… get this woman a straitjacket
It was a federal fire… get this woman a straitjacket.