PENTICTON — British Columbia is on fire (again), and Premier David Eby is at the airport awkwardly high-fiving hundreds of Mexican firefighters who've arrived to contain the blazes.The province currently has 214 personnel from Mexico, 34 from Australia, and five from New Zealand supporting hundreds of provincial firefighters, with additional international resources expected in the coming days..Meanwhile, just months earlier, British Columbia’s youth unemployment rate stood at a staggering 15.6% in the lead-up to fire season.This is the same government that loudly claimed success in attracting hundreds of US healthcare professionals. In March, Eby and Health Minister Josie Osborne announced that more than 400 American-trained doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, and allied health workers had accepted job offers in BC as of January.Yet when the media, including the Western Standard, asked basic follow-up questions — about actual start dates, retention, regional distribution beyond the high-level numbers, net impact on wait times, or the full cost of the campaign — the government went quiet. The pattern is familiar: big announcement, selective details, then stonewalling. Announce the win and then refuse the scrutiny..While the efforts of the Mexican firefighters are greatly appreciated, and it's nice to see some trans-national cooperation — a refreshing break from the trans-national repression and extortion we've become accustomed to — this also means we have a province that cannot, or will not, systematically train its own young people for one of the most necessary, high-demand seasonal jobs in the province.Wouldn’t it be better to have more firefighters trained right here in BC who don’t have to be flown in? People who already know the roads, the neighbourhoods, and the regions they’re defending? I’m no firefighting expert, but familiarity with the terrain and local roadways seems like a significant tactical advantage.Wildland firefighting is hard, physical, dangerous work, necessitating a reasonably youthful workforce. It also pays decent seasonal wages, builds skills, and can serve as an entry point into a full career in emergency response, resource management, or related trades.Mutual aid has its place, of course. Reciprocal arrangements with Mexico, Australia, and other Canadian provinces exist for good reason when local capacity is overwhelmed. That doesn't excuse, however, the failure to build deeper domestic capacity in the first place..The NDP has spent years expanding the public sector, pouring money into preferred programs, and ballooning the bureaucracy and deficit. When it comes to putting unemployed British Columbian teenagers and twenty-somethings into boots and hard hats to protect British Columbian communities, the urgency magically evaporates.BC Wildfire Service received a record 2,400 applications this year for roughly 200 to 225 new seasonal recruit spots. Demand is clearly there. The pipeline is not.The result is the spectacle of Mexican crews arriving to applause from the unusually jovial BC Premier while local youth face double-digit depression-level unemployment.“To be clear,” as the politicians say: this is not anti-immigrant sentiment, and it is not an attack on the firefighters themselves. Those crews are doing dangerous work on our behalf and deserve the utmost respect. Rather, it is an indictment of a government that has lost the basic instinct to develop its own people for the jobs that need doing.If the province can sustain a swollen health bureaucracy — complete with dozens of vice-presidents and layers upon layers of administration — while still needing to import hundreds of American healthcare workers, surely it can find the will to hire young British Columbian men and women desperate for work to help prevent their own communities from burning down.
