By Scott Taylor
As a resident of Canada’s capital, I can admit that the nationwide wildfire crisis suddenly became all too real last week.
A thick smoke haze engulfed Ottawa and much of southern Ontario for several days, prompting health advisories.
Pollution levels literally went off the charts with experts estimating that citizens were exposed to 100 to 200 times the normal range of pollutants.
The prevailing wind currents resulted in most of the eastern U.S. seaboard being blanketed with the same thick pall of smoke.
New York was the hardest hit city, and residents were quick to blame Canada by jokingly referring to the haze as the ‘Eh’pocalypse.
As an emergency stop-gap measure, firefighters have been brought in from France, South Africa and the USA to help provincial authorities to battle the still out of control wildfires.
There is no federal agency tasked with fighting these fires, but in some cases provincial governments have requested assistance from the Canadian Armed Forces.
This support will come mainly from the army in the form of actual firefighters on the ground, with the air force providing some emergency airlift of endangered citizens.
The reason for this is that in a country that boasts 362 million hectares of forest – the third largest in the world – our air force is not equipped for, nor tasked with fighting forest fires.
The even crazier part of this equation is that Canadian aerospace industries have historically produced one of the world’s most effective water bombers. Originally built by Canadair, the CL-415 was nicknamed the ‘Super Scooper’ when it first flew in 1993.
A twin-engine propeller plane, the CL-415 was custom designed to allow it to refill with water from lakes near the targeted forest fire, by skimming the surface. This allows the CL-415 far more time on station near the blaze rather than having to return to an actual airfield.
Following Canadair, Bombardier subsequently built the ‘415’ and then in turn it was De Haviland Canada that produced these water bombers.
In October 2016 the CL-415 programme was acquired by the Victoria, BC based Viking Air.
Their aim is to modernize the existing design into what will be renamed the DHC-515 Firefighter, which will be produced at a plant in Calgary.
Spread across Canada, there are approximately 64 of the CL-415 aircraft employed by private companies and provincial governments.
International users of this ‘Firefighter’ are almost all foreign air forces; Croatia, Greece, Indonesia, Morocco, Portugal and Spain just to name a few.
Which begs the question, why is the RCAF not responsible for fighting forest fires?
As we are currently witnessing, these wildfires pay no need to provincial boundaries.
Our forests are a valuable natural resource; worth I daresay, as much protection as our international borders.
We are barely into this year’s wildfire season and it is already one of the most destructive on record. The research indicates that things will only worsen with time. The changes in climate create warmer, drier conditions, increased drought and a longer wildfire season.
For much of North America, projections show that an annual average increase in temperature by 1 degree Celsius will result in an increase in the median burn area by as much as 600% in some forests.
If this is the new reality then Canada needs to act now.
If the threat was of a military nature we would have to find the will and the means to mobilize the necessary resources. Instead, Canada is battling the forces of nature.
However, this is also an opportunity for Canada to shift the focus of our military – particularly our air force – to protecting our resources and by extension Canadians health and welfare as well.
A huge investment in Canadian aerospace to build an iconic Canadian designed water bomber should be a popular one.
In re-rolling the RCAF to be the lead agency in combating wildfires, perhaps this would provide the genesis to create a true Air Reserve located at airfields all across the country.
Pilots and crews could be part-time reservists with legislation to protect their jobs when mobilized for active service.
Dropping loads of water on forest fires may not be as exciting as the prospect of engaging Russian fighter jets in a dog fight, but it would still be a hell of a lot more challenging than flying a cargo plane for a courier service.
It would also be great public relations for the Canadian military to have waterbombers bedecked in RCAF markings battling fires to save forests and remote communities.
As the fight against wildfires is seasonally hemispheric, if Canada was to possess such a potent firefighting resource as a 515 Firefighter equipped Air Wing of the RCAF, during our winter they could be deployed into the southern hemisphere.
Think of the international goodwill such support could earn for Canada- just as we are currently thankful to the French, South African and American firefighters here in Canada to help us get through the current crisis.
The threat of increased wildfires is real. The time to act is now.
