A job well done. That’s how Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault is describing Parks Canada’s efforts at forest management in the years leading up to last week’s fire that destroyed a third of the Jasper townsite.And even though federal officials — including his department — knew the raging pine beetle was a serious hazard, Guilbeault couldn’t help but blame climate change for making it worse.“As we are seeing in Canada and all around the world, we are seeing more and more aggressive forest fires,” he said on a media call on Monday. .“We certainly saw that in the summer of 2023 and this is what we were faced with, and the fact that we were able to protect several percent of the town speaks to all of those measures we have put in place over over the years, and frankly, decades.”Parks Canada CEO Ron Hallman, who also lives in Jasper, said he found suggestions — many from Jasper residents — that his agency put tree huggers over people as personally insulting.“I reject the premise of the question that Parks Canada place nature before people. It's a ridiculous statement, and one that is offensive. Frankly, there is nothing more important for the entire Parks Canada team than the safety of our employees, our guests, the people we work with, and anyone who says anything differently doesn't know very much about us,” he said.Hallman said officials had been aware of the pine beetle problem around Jasper since at least 1996 and had implemented a plan of prescribed burns and fire breaks over the years, including 15 in the last year alone..But he said the scale of the problem was — and still is — so vast that it’s almost impossible to prevent even more future destruction.“And let me just say what the ‘fire smarting’ means in Jasper, in the preparation, because pine beetle is through hundreds of 1000s of hectares of forest, and short of bulldozing all of that, or burning all of it, or mechanically removing all of it, we work to minimize risk to towns to other assets of Parks Canada within the park,” he said."We work to thin the trees so that the fire, if it does come, we'll have to work harder, and it can't just become a big wall or a crown fire. But all of those things are simply tools to help us face a fire that may come. They don't prevent a potential fire. How could it?”Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland called the fact that only a third of the town was destroyed a “victory” rather than a defeat.“We suffered casualties. Absolutely, and it is so incredibly hurtful, but we did hold our ground,” he said. “We're talking about stretch of land, a valley that's kilometers wide and 30 kilometers long, and it is absolutely full of pine beetle dead trees. There is no conceivable way to remove all of them. So we had to prepare for the for the eventuality of fire and the defenses and the people did the work that they had to do… because of the defenses that had been built, 70% of our town has been saved.” .Landon Shepherd, Incident Commander for Parks Canada,also blamed climate change for intensifying the magnitude of blazes over the years.“This isn't meant to be discussion about climate change, but anyone who's involved in in fire management can tell you that things have become more difficult, especially in the last five years, to manage impacts,” he said. "But as Ron was was discussing, this isn't something that that caught us blindsided. We started fire smart treatments near the community, recognizing that we wanted to have the community to be more easily defendable. It's something that weighs on me.”
