B.C. urged to do more prescribed burns — and fast

Calls are growing for British Columbia to do more of this. Burning forests on purpose to thwart future wildfires. Meticulously planned, high-tech, smoky, but safe. We target certain clumps and certain pockets of trees for that. Yeah. Every year, British Columbia is increasing prescribed burns, but nowhere near as much as the Americans. Neighbors complain. I mean, you got to stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air. As losses mount. I was furious. And worries grow. One of these years is going to be really, really bad. And it's because we didn't do enough ahead of time. Okay, we'll get rolling. Welcome everybody to the Akiskanak Columbia Basin Trust prescribed burn block. Burn day starts with a safety briefing. One of our biggest priorities today is going to be smoke management. We're in the Kootenays, not far from Invermere, on the Akiskanak First Nations traditional territory. These firefighters are from the nation, the town, the province and Parks Canada. Today's burn is part of a two-week training program. They've spent days in the classroom. Now it's time for action. Ignitions, burn boss. Clear to commence test ignitions. Nick Wingfield has never done this before. My role is trainee burn boss. He's studied fires, fought fires, and today he's in charge of setting them. The idea is to remove things like surface fuels the long grasses we see around here ahead of the fire season so that if a fire were to ignite here there'd be lower what we call fuel load lower pieces of wood and debris for a wildfire to consume and gain energy. There are three burns happening in this area today, a huge operation. Drones drop fire capsules from the air, infrared cameras beam images to the bosses, weather, soil and wind are monitored closely. Crews make sure the fire goes where they want it to and nowhere else. It's all a shift in philosophy, from suppressing flames to using them much more. I don't have to press anything, I just... Nope, but keep your hand maybe right here. Here? Okay. And then dip it down in there. Okay. And it's not easy. I find that out quickly. It's heavy! Tough work! And it's hot! At another burn not far away, we meet Fawn's Rach Elders. He's in charge of the British Columbia Wildfire Service's Cultural and Prescribed Burn Program. Cultural burns are those led by indigenous communities. Fighting fire is not something that you can learn on a PowerPoint. Same with prescribed fire. It's not the kind of thing that you can just teach reading a book. How Canada prevents and fights wildfires has drawn the attention of the White House. And we're going to put a big tariff on Canada because of the smoke. Canada, they have to do something about it. You know, we've never had this problem. All of a sudden we have this problem with Canada. So we'll have to talk to them about that. Canadians may dismiss Trump's bluster, but there is a difference in how the U.S. and Canada use fire to prevent fire. Western states are doing a lot more prescribed burns. Here's what's happening in BC. In 2025 there were 76 cultural and prescribed burns covering 6,351 hectares, much more than the year before or the year before that. But check out how much the western states are doing. Washington state told us it burns an average of 14,000 hectares a year, more than double BC's best year. Oregon's average is ten times B.C.'s best year, and California burns more too, an average of 13,000 hectares over the last ten years. And so Washington State, Oregon, California, they've set targets and they've set a budget for those targets. They have a plan of where they want to get to. B.C., we don't have a plan. So this is all stored energy. All this organic matter is stored energy. Bob Gray is a fire ecologist. He spent decades working in both Canada and the U.S. Gray thinks B.C. should be doing many more prescribed burns. Oh These fourth-year forestry students are hiking deep into a federally protected forest to learn about fire from Gray. Fire is part of a healthy forest, flames far more common before people started putting them out. Indigenous communities used fire for millennia, burning to help with planting, plant growth, and to prevent dangerous wildfires. Governments stopped those practices until recently. And the forest industry used fire after logging, but that also stopped in the 1990s over concern about smoke and safety. Decades without burning means forests like this are full of younger trees and fallen branches, dangerous fuel in a world of rising temperatures and drought. But the deficit we're in now, we need to be burning a couple hundred thousand hectares a year. So why aren't we? Capacity. So we have to have people, but we also have to have funding. In 2025, B.C. allocated $40 million for wildfire prevention, but it doesn't specify how much of that is for prescribed burning. It's actually tough to figure out how much B.C. spends on prescribed burns. There's no one budget. Communities can apply for funding from different agencies. And Gray says they are competing with each other. Right now, they're conducting a project. It's practice. That's all it is. You're doing five hectares, it's practice. A program is when you have five or 10 years with the burns on the books ahead of time. You know they're fully funded. You're bringing people in to train into these positions. Right now, all we're funding are projects and that's not going to get this solved. One-offs, exactly. The thing is, it's much more expensive to fight fires than prevent them. A recent study from the University of California, Davis, found that every dollar spent on wildfire prevention saved $3.75 in disaster response. On average, British Columbia spends half a billion dollars every year on fire suppression. This summer, it wasn't enough. In August, a late afternoon fire ripped through the mountains in B.C.'s South Okanagan forcing more than 20,000 people from their homes. An elderly woman died trying to escape. It destroyed more than 150 buildings devastating the village of Baldur. There was no stopping this fire so there was no firefighting here. Joel Patton lost the house where he lived with his wife and two young daughters. It's highs and lows. Some days are great. Some days I don't want to get out of bed. But again, you know, you just have to put one foot in front of the other. And, you know, we have rebuilding that's going to happen. He takes me to the Bald Range Mountains where the fire started. It's the first time he's been here since the fire. Turns out there were plans to do prescribed burning in the area, but it hadn't happened yet. I didn't know about that until my house actually went down and we actually started advocating. I was furious and it's not even the furious of like, oh, no, I've lost everything out. It's furious because I was like, how did people get pushed aside? In August, a spokesperson with BC Wildfire Service blamed bureaucracy, saying overlapping authorizations are a challenge when it comes to planning burns, adding there is no denying the current layers of process are a challenge and have historically been an impediment to the efficient approval of cultural and prescribed fire projects. Even though it may not stop the fire, what if it slowed it? Absolutely less fuel loaded. You know, we could have gone and had people on the ground to know what the conditions were. Two years ago, the B.C. Wildfire Service created a committee to deal with all the agencies working with prescribed fire. If everybody does what they're good at and what they're specialized in, and they can do that together, then we see a lot of success. Bonds-Rachelders says burns like this are exactly what the province should be doing. Different jurisdictions working together, protecting the forest and learning. Are we doing enough of it? No, I don't think anybody is, that being said, the answer is not let's just do more, it's not so easy. These crews are doing what they can, but risk is growing, says Gray. Those of us in the fire science world, we look at this and go, one of these years is going to be really, really bad. And it's because we didn't do enough ahead of time. A warning to do more of this, and soon.