A history of cuts to Alberta's firefighting budget, explained

It's been an intense start to Alberta's wildfire season. As of Wednesday, already more than 425,000 hectares have burned — more than double the past three years combined.

As the crisis unfolds during a provincial election campaign, a debate has emerged about the provincial budget for fighting wildfires, and whether past political decisions play a role in Alberta's current crisis.

On Tuesday, former members of the disbanded Wildland Firefighter Rappel Program drew attention to the UCP government's decision to shutter that unit in 2019, saying that they could have been "difference-makers" in the current crisis.

In the online debate that ensued, some noted that the NDP also cut the wildfire budget in 2016.

So what are the facts — and how important was the rappel team?

What was the Wildland Firefighter Rappel Program?

The rappel team was part of Alberta's wildfire response strategy for decades. Created in 1983, the unit of specialized firefighters would rappel from helicopters to quickly access remote wildfires.

This combination of speed and mobility allowed for more rapid deployment of firefighting resources directly to wildfires in cases without road access or safe helicopter landing conditions. That helps combat fires while they're still relatively small.

When the UCP government under former premier Jason Kenney announced in 2019 that it was closing down the rappel program, the unit had 63 members stationed around the province.

Why did the program end?

When Devin Dreeshen — then the UCP minister of agriculture and forestry — announced the decision in November 2019, he said it was informed by a desire to "modernize" Alberta's firefighting and "making changes to align with best practices in other provinces."

Dreeshen gave two key justifications: less than two per cent of firefighters rappelled into wildfires in Alberta, and the cuts would save $23 million.

Shortly after Dreeshen's announcement, a member of the rappel program filed a freedom of information request. Those documents showed that closing the program saved only about $1.4 million. They also captured confusion among government staffers in emails about the "two per cent" figure Dreeshen used.

That number reflects how often rappelling was used across all wildfires in Alberta from 2014 to 2018. But rappelling is a tactic meant to be used only when other options, such as landing a helicopter nearby, are not possible. The government correspondence shows that rappel teams were called out around 100 times each year during that period, and rappelling was required more than 20 times per year.

How important is a rappel team for fighting wildfires?

In 2019, during an extreme wildfire season, the government commissioned a review of prevention and response strategies. That lengthy report features a number of recommendations, and repeatedly mentions the critical importance of an early response to wildfires.

The report even puts hard figures on that importance.

Looking at data from 2011 to 2019, the report finds that if crews arrived at fires faster, they were significantly more likely, on average, to contain the fire by the following day.

For the highest-intensity fires, crews that arrived before a fire reached two hectares in size were able to contain the blaze by the following morning 94 per cent of the time, compared with 43 per cent for a slower response.

Average suppression costs for a fire also increased dramatically when initial containment failed.

The report calculates the total savings of initial containment — including land value and fire suppression costs for all wildfires in Alberta from 2011 to 2019 — at more than half a billion dollars.

The report had been commissioned but not yet completed when the provincial government cut the rappel team in 2019.

Did the NDP also cut the wildfire budget?

Yes. Under former premier Rachel Notley, the provincial government cut $15 million from the wildfire budget in 2016. The move faced criticism at the time: it came after a major wildfire season the previous year, and another, even worse season was beginning. Those two years combined saw more than a million hectares burn in Alberta.

Notley defended her decision at the time, saying that the province's emergency budget would cover any firefighting needs. The province spent $375 million fighting wildfires in 2015, and all of that money came from the emergency budget.

Would the rappel team have made a difference in the current crisis?

That's impossible to know for sure. The 2019 report doesn't include costs or containment rates for years after the team was eliminated.

Mathieu Bourbonnais, a member of Alberta's rappel unit from 2005 to 2011, said rappelling isn't always needed to get to a fire quickly, but sometimes it's the only way.

"When you don't have that ability to put people on the fire, your approach times can be really long," he said.

"You might need to walk in from the nearest landing spot, which sometimes can be kilometres away. And you have to move a lot of equipment."

Bourbonnais, who is now an assistant professor and researcher at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus, points out the impossibility of speculation.

"There's no way for us to look back at fires and say, 'If there had been a rappel crew there, would they have rappelled, and would that have been more effective as a suppression response on that fire?'"

But as the 2019 Alberta wildfire report makes clear, a rapid response can make a significant difference, and rappel teams can rapidly access the most difficult areas.

"When you're in a situation like we have in Alberta right now — where you have very, very hot temperatures; fuels are incredibly dry; extreme fire weather events — response times become absolutely critical," Bourbonnais said.

Asked on Tuesday about the decision to end the rappel team, UCP Leader Danielle Smith said she wants to do an assessment of firefighting capacity and "analyze what we need for baseline support."

It feels like wildfires are becoming a bigger problem every year. Is that true?

As scientists have said for years, one of the effects of climate change is that extreme weather events will become more frequent.

That includes heat waves, droughts, high wind and lightning — all ingredients for a wildfire crisis.

In 2019, the year that the rappel program was cancelled, Alberta saw 883,411 hectares burned in wildfires — the most since 1981, when 1.3 million hectares burned.

Bourbonnais said Alberta's forests and ecosystems "evolved with fire over a long time," becoming integral to their normal cycles. The determined efforts of humans to suppress all fires has disrupted those natural rhythms. The result is a build-up of "fuel," which, alongside the more frequent extreme weather caused by climate change, creates conditions ripe for disaster.

"This idea that we can suppress all fires is being increasingly challenged," said Bourbonnais, adding that we need to "shift our perspective in some way to think about how we can coexist better with fire on the landscape."