Interfering Alberta officials made things worse during last year’s catastrophic Jasper fire: report
As was obvious at the time, the UCP was focused on what really mattered in an emergency: Making the Liberal Government in Ottawa look bad
Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government will do anything to own the Libs – even if they have to burn your house down to do it!
That at least is an inference that can be drawn from a 57-page report commissioned by the Town of Jasper and released yesterday that concludes the Alberta government made things worse when its officials kept interfering with the efforts by Parks Canada and the Town of Jasper to control the mighty forest fire that roared through the mountain resort on July 22 last year, destroying about a third of its structures.
In all, about 800 houses and apartments were destroyed in addition to commercial and community buildings. More than 25,000 residents and visitors were forced to flee the rapidly advancing wall of flames.
Whereas “the response to the Jasper Wildfire Complex demonstrated the effectiveness of the strong Unified Command established by the Municipality of Jasper and Parks Canada,” said the after-action report based on a survey of firefighters and officials, “provincial involvement added complexity to the response as the Province of Alberta, though not jurisdictionally responsible to lead the incident, regularly requested information and sought to exercise decision-making authority.”
“Jurisdictional overlap with the province created political challenges that disrupted the focus of incident commanders, leading to time spent managing inquiries and issues instead of directing the wildfire response and re-entry,” said the report, which is posted on the Town of Jasper’s Website.
The report “is not intended to ascribe blame,” said a news release from the town. “By sharing our experiences now, we hope to contribute to the growing body of knowledge that supports better planning, stronger partnerships, and more resilient communities across Alberta,” said Jasper Chief Administrative Officer Bill Given in the release.
While politely worded and largely focused on the positive, the report also noted that the Alberta Emergency Management Agency seems to have made things worse. “Inefficiencies in signing in, tracking and checking out resources … resulted in a lack of awareness regarding resource availability and location, which contributed to confusion, increased safety risks and hindered effective allocation of resources.”
Of course they did. As was obvious at the time, the Alberta Government was focused on what really mattered to the United Conservative Party in a catastrophic emergency: Making the Liberal Government in Ottawa look bad in the lead-up to a federal election.
Nowhere in the report does the word “grandstanding” appear, but readers may recall Premier Danielle Smith, Forestry Minister Todd Loewen and Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis showing up for a news conference all togged out in cool emergency garb.
Then there was Ms. Smith’s carping about Parks Canada’s approach to fire management in the aftermath of the catastrophe and her suggestion that the province could do it better by paying loggers to clear firebreaks and letting ranchers graze cattle in the parks to keep the breaks clear.
She told her free CORUS Radio show on July 27, “There’s no reason why we can’t say, ‘Hey, guess what? Can you prioritize cutting here? Can you prioritize building fire breaks in this way?’ Once we’ve built the fire break, can we use it, either by having cattle on there to graze it, so that it stays, uh, capped, so that’s it’s managed year after year?
“Those are all things that we’ll be doing with our own forest management areas,” she said, “and then hoping to apply some of those lessons federally.”
During the same show, Ms. Smith broached the possibility of Alberta taking over national parks within the province’s borders, supposedly as a joke that didn’t really sound like a joke.
When she and Mr. Loewen first met then federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, she claimed during her monologue, she asked her sidekick, “‘Did you talk to Minister Guilbeault yet about how we’re gonna be takin’ back the national parks?’ I laughed. He didn’t.”
“It was a joke at the time,” Ms. Smith rambled on, “but I can tell you that I think we have the capacity and the on-the-ground ability to respond in a way that should be more unified. If that requires us to be a bit more assertive in trying to change some of the rules around how they manage their parks, how they manage the prescribed burns, how they manage the cuts. I do know we’ll be very, very active in pressing that along.”
Yesterday’s after-action report makes it sound as if Alberta being “a bit more assertive” is precisely what’s not needed.
The UCP’s blame-Ottawa game was still continuing six months later, and they’ll probably be at it again today. Leastways, The Canadian Press reported that a spokesperson for Mr. Ellis, who is responsible for overseeing the Emergency Management Agency, said they’re hard at work on a response.