By Dr. Joseph Fournier
Americans often picture Canada as a vast northern forest – an endless expanse of pristine wilderness. But the truth is far more complex and increasingly relevant to U.S.–Canada policy debates. Eighty‑nine percent of Canada is Crown land, owned by federal or provincial governments. Yet only about 10–12% of that land receives detailed ecological monitoring.
This matters because U.S. trade policy, Canadian conservation policy, and federal herbicide permitting are now combining to reshape North America’s forests in ways few Americans recognize.
Over the past 20 years, Canada’s sawmill and pulp‑and‑paper sectors have entered a steep decline. Statistics Canada and industry reports show that mill closures have accelerated, especially in western Canada, where over 30% of softwood lumber capacity has disappeared. Employment has dropped sharply. Entire forestry towns have hollowed out.
And while multiple factors contribute – mountain pine beetle damage, wildfire losses, transportation bottlenecks – the most overlooked driver is the federal government’s long‑standing approval of spraying Roundup (glyphosate) herbicide across millions of hectares of Crown forests. For decades, glyphosate has been used to kill broadleaf species – birch, aspen, poplar – so that commercially valuable conifers can dominate.
But this practice has consequences. Roundup creates monoculture conifer stands, which are more resin‑rich and significantly more flammable than mixed‑species forests. Instead of diverse, moisture‑retaining ecosystems, Canada is producing vast tracts of single‑age, single‑species pine and spruce – exactly the kind of forests that burn explosively under extreme fire weather.
The result is a continental paradox: Policies meant to “manage” forests have instead created more combustible landscapes, contributing to the anomalous rise in total annual area burned.
Deterioration of Canada’s forestry is also being accelerated by domestic policy. Rising carbon taxes on diesel and gasoline – critical fuels for logging, hauling, and mill operations – have increased costs across the supply chain. New layers of regulation slow approvals and reduce harvest flexibility. And when pulp mills close, sawmills lose buyers for residual chips and sawdust, undermining their economics even further.
But the most consequential impact of this industrial contraction is ecological. Canada’s parklands – where monitoring exists – show a clear trend of rapidly aging boreal forests, with large stands now reaching 70 to 120 years old.
In Alberta’s eastern foothills, provincial parks contain dense, overmature, fuel‑loaded forests primed for high‑intensity wildfire. Decades of fire suppression, beetle kill, drought, and heavy recreational pressure have created extreme fire risk. As Parks Canada itself warns, “the reduction or exclusion of fire as a natural process … leads to increased risk of wildfires.”
The consequences are here. Alberta’s Jasper National Park recently nearly burned to the ground when extreme fire weather collided with decades of fuel accumulation, beetle‑killed forests, a highly vulnerable townsite, and infrastructure failures.
Nonetheless, long‑term fire data tell a more nuanced story.
According to Canada’s National Burned Area Composite and CIFFC wildfire statistics, forest‑fire frequency has declined since the 1980s. Canada is experiencing fewer fires overall.
What has changed is the total area burned, which had remained relatively moderate for decades but then spiked dramatically in 2023 and again in 2025, producing two of the worst years for fires in modern Canadian history.
These spikes reflect the dangerous combination of aging forests, heavy fuel loads, glyphosate‑driven monoculture, and extreme fire weather – not an increase in ignition frequency.
Meanwhile, federal biodiversity reports show that parks are not experiencing net improvement. Most ecosystems are stable, but among those changing, declines outnumber gains. And crucially, non‑park Crown lands are not monitored at all, meaning there is no empirical basis to claim that conservation designations improve biodiversity.
Yet Ottawa is moving ahead with its flagship 30×30 agenda – a plan to place 30% of Canada’s land and water under conservation status by 2030.
In practice, this means restricting forestry across vast areas when forests are aging, fuel‑loaded, and increasingly prone to extreme fire behavior. By limiting private‑sector utilization, 30×30 will increase fuel loading, exacerbate forest aging, and reduce the thinning and harvesting activities that mitigate catastrophic wildfire.
For Americans concerned about lumber prices or wildfire smoke drifting south, the lesson is simple. Canada’s forests are increasingly unmanaged, aging, and burning, not because Canadians don’t care, but because the economic and policy frameworks governing those forests are pushing the country toward less active management.
North America needs forestry – not just parks – to remain resilient.
Originally published at The DailyWire, July 31, 2026.
Joseph Fournier, Ph.D., has worked in the energy industry and environmental sciences and is a member of the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He writes from his family’s ranch east of Calgary.
Tags: Alberta, CIFFC, Forestry, Canada, wildfires
Another clear example of government screwing things up. They don’t know what is best for forests or anything else. They screw up one thing after another.
Government locks in yesterday’s status quo, which not only reverts today’s fixes for yesterday’s problems, but also prevents tomorrow’s fixes for tomorrow’s problems.
Are you implying that private companies do things better? Because I’m sure we could list many examples of private companies screwing things up.
The difference may not be obvious to you. Private companies have market competition and the fear of bankruptcy, lost customers, and liability lawsuits. Government doesn’t. Governments are immortal, coercive, and monopolies.
Oh yeah.
Private companies censor you left and right if you don’t go along with their climate BS that they forced on us.
Who cancel you for wrongthink.
Who force you to take a Vaccines of other private companies if you don’t want to lose your job.
Who promote any war after war after war.
Who buy politicians via legal bribery(lobbyism)
and owners of private companies who currently occupy highest governmental positions en masse they are not qualified for
and who actually control politics to such a degree that ” The USA is an Oligarchy not a democracy – Princeton Study “(that’s the moment the indoctrinated donkey screams “We are a CONstitutional Republic)
So whats the difference between private companies and government right now?
3 out of the last 6 presidents are billionaires.
You take shit from private companies you won’t take from the government because Wokes News told you so
and you instantly scream for a big government as soon as the private sector scream for war and wants an absrd increase of an already absurd military spending and a useless golden dome with a 4% interception rate
and 10 mio dollars cost per (failed) interception – because private companies bribed these lunacies into the government.
What if they were 900 millionaires instead of billionaires 😉
Right, so companies should just go along with all your conspiracist nonsense, like THE JOOOS!
Fauci was not working for a private company when he pushed censorship of any opinions which did not support his proximal origin lies.
Both things can’t be true. If it was censored, how did you learn about it?
I remember how joyous you statists were when the government told private social media companies to censor COVID and climate skeptics.
I remember how distressed you statists were when that filthy billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and not only stopped that government censoring, he exposed it for what it was.
Tell me how private companies censored the government. Tell me how billionaire Elon Musk did more damage than millionaire Tony Fauci.
And this particular quote from you is really telling: “The USA is an Oligarchy not a democracy” — made possible because government is in the driver’s seat. If government weren’t all powerful, those oligarchs couldn’t push government around, could they?
Which is it — powerful government, or powerful government?
Jeez, give it a rest, willya?
Private companies don’t have armed force to compel people to obey their stupidity. Do please try to keep up.
Probably-so what? Private enterprise fks-up too-it’s an imperfect world. The Gov, however, holds the trophy for truly huge screwups on any given day or subject…count those while you’re at it, wise guy.
When private companies screw things up they have to answer to their customers, to the law and to regulators. Government doesn’t, that is the difference.
Disproportional in private companies. Not even close.
Thank you for the article.
As far as forest management, greens have their heads so far up their metaphorical asses they see teeth
I’ve been saying that for 50 years in in Wokeachusetts.
The unjustified tariffs on Canadia softwood lumber don’t help either! Better to let that lumber build higher quali and cheaper American homes than to let it burn!
We agree, Canada shouldn’t put tariffs on US goods. Canada has been taking advantage of the US for a long time.
I am all for more harvesting. Whatever has to be done or negotiated to facilitate that.
The boreal forest is incredibly huge and empty on the human scale of population. Roads into it are actually a rarity unless you are in some mining or petro development area. In many places it is nearly impenetrable by equipment, and very difficult on foot. There is a reason the fur traders travelled by canoe. Practically speaking, a forest fire is just going to burn until rainfall, snowfall, or swampy ground puts it out, and it won’t be endangering any people’s homes as we see in Spain or France or California, because there are no people within miles of it…in fact sending in water bombers or whatever is actually endangering the firefighters lives for no good reason…if there is a town in the way, the town is probably going to burn down unless the forest has been clear cut back for a mile or two, giving local firefighters the possibility of putting out the grass and brush fires started by flying embers. Look up Fort McMurray or Jasper wildfires.
These fires are the result of dry windy weather and lightning strikes. Where there are roads, poorly tended campfires and careless cigarette butt tossing are too often the cause, but there are also fire departments nearby.
Once a decade ago, a wild grass fire was heading towards my house. In minutes about 50 workers, a couple of road graders, tractors, 4 fire trucks, and half a dozen big trailers with water tanks showed up seemingly out of nowhere. It had already burned a full mile to near my house. Dry 60 kmh winds were driving it, ignition point was beside a highway…my wife grabbed the cat even though allergic, and drove a few miles away…fortunately everything was saved by the planned and quick reactions of fire crews.
You often read that 90% of Canadians live within a few miles of the U.S border…but more correctly we live at the border of, or within the boreal forest….
Yes the mostly uninhabited Thunder Bay District from Lake Superior to Hudson’s Bay had over 800,000 acres burning. No way to manage or control that. It is usually just a few hundred thousand but this was a bad year. The northern half of North America is mostly uninhabited.
All the more reason to timber the h3ll out of it, ship lumber and wood products worldwide and become wealthy. Oh, yea, the becoming wealthy part, that is where all the opposition comes from, spreading poverty is more important to leftist morons.
It is difficult terrain for building roads or anything.
A very good analysis for the folks who don’t know those things. Canada has always burned; there is simply no help for it as things stand now-and probably won’t be for decades to come, quite possibly a century or more.
The basic premise of the article is correct; the Clinton fire in BC is now threatening our almost-completed new house in the Cariboo. We have watched the last few years while building that both the Chasm mill and the 100 Mile House West Fraser lumber mill have shut down for lack of available timber, while we drove daily through 12 miles of old forest with 3 foot diameter firs slowly dying and falling on the way from a friend’s spare cabin to our property. This stretch is now on fire and headed toward the property, the evacuation alert came today. Last I read that fire has consumed over 60,000 hectares of forest, much of it merchantable timber. That fire did engulf the friend’s ranch.
To close down the BC forestry industry, and put BC residents out of work reducing wealth and tax generation, while increasing the size of forest fires–and then expending hundreds of million$ importing ‘professional’ fire fighters from other provinces and even countries to fight forest fires, is not a sane end result of forest management. It is indeed difficult to understand without conclusions of either incredible incompetence, or deliberate action enabled by environmentalism, often financed by out-of-country sources–or a combination of both. Take your pick; Vivian Kraus has documented the funding sources.
There is for much of this summer another major fire in the Fraser Canyon between Hope and Lytton–also burning merchantable timber. The lumber mills that were the economic base of Boston Bar (in the middle of the Fraser Canyon) have also been closed for many years, while the trees grew to maturity and then caught fire. Things are not being managed well.
To pick at semantics–eastern Alberta is not foothills. I think that was a misprint of the foothills in western Alberta being east of the Rockies–which form much of Alberta’s western boundary with BC. The foothills are underlain by the same intense folding of the Rockies, but with an overlain post-Laramide Eocene sediment layer masking the structure underneath–somewhat extending out over and blending with the Western Sedimentary Basin which underlies eastern Alberta and a couple of provinces east–at least south of the Shield rocks. (Which admittedly has nothing to do with the subject and I apologize.)
It all boils down to reducing government green regulation, allowing proper forest management including adequate access, selective logging, thinning and regular burning of undergrowth. Allowing vast areas of forest to be conservation areas, just creates endless fire hazards waiting to burn up and destroy all plants and wildlife with no benefit to anybody.
Don’t apologize; any and all info helps see the broader picture. Besides I was passing thru there many, many years ago, and my foggy memory of the obvious topography is refreshed and I can put a new and better mental picure on top (and under) said landscape. Thank you. You sure you don’t have my hammer?
“On the advice of council….”
I see lots of over mature forest.
I would like to add…
Back in the late 1990s, part of Kelowna (a city in the province of British Columbia) was burned in a wildfire. A commission was formed to study this fire, and forest management. The commission said that the pine beetle infested wood should be cleared. The government of the day made a deal with the logging mills to harvest the pine beetle infested wood. The mills spent a lot of money, and tooled up to process the pine beetle wood.
Then the province of British Columbia had an election. The new government canceled the whole project, because of complaints from several groups, environmental and indigenous. The pine beetle infestation exploded. The province of British Columbia had bigger fires. The province of British Columbia had an opportunity to minimize the pine beetle impacts, but didn’t.
According to Claude AI only 0.1% – 0.3% of BC’s forests have been sprayed with Glyphosate so that claim is obviously exaggerated. Canada has roughly 362 million hectares of forest much of which has no roads and is not accessible in any practical way for “Forest Management”. Americans need some geography lessons about Canada.
Just looking at Google Earth shows the reality of the extent of the arboreal landscape of Canada. In defence of my fellow non Canadian commentators on here, it’s not easy to visualise the vastness and remoteness of the Canadian geographical landscape anymore than it is to visualise that of Russia.
Even by road, such as there are, it’s not easy. A visual clue, perhaps: In my travels up and over there I came to a 4-way stop sign out in the middle of only God knows where. One road went W to BC; one went N and became the Yukon Highway; one went NE to Edmonton; the one we were on went S back to the States. Try to imagine seeing a stop sign, in the totally black darkness, in the dense forest, in French and English. Surreal. That’s the Canadian arboreal forest in a nutshell.
It’s a hit piece to justify the new round of tarifs against canada from epsteins friends in washington. Or alienate US allies for putin. Hard to say. That’s their way to thank all the canadian firefighters who came to the US to help with their wildfires.
They also need a reality check that it’s not 1960 anymore and the US is rapidly losing allies and influence.
Lol
“from epsteins friends in washington”
Congradulations !
You just made it onto the Clintons sHit list !
He’s too useful an idiot to be Clintonized. Unfortunately
“epsteins friends in washington”
A lot of Democrats in Washington… Epstein donated heavily to them.
Ohhhh SHADDUP!
You need to turn the timber industry loose, then your forest management nightmare would only be the occasional bad dream.
I’ve worked in western Canada and NW US for 50 years in mineral exploration, mining, and logging; never seen or heard of forested areas being sprayed with glyphosate, not once. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, just that it hasn’t around here. An ‘here’ encompasses a large area from Idaho and Washington to Yukon and NWT. I have however read of grain fields in Europe being sprayed with glyphosate in mid summer to assist in dryness by harvesting time, and wonder how much that has contributed to the large fires over there.
true.
The spraying is required by tree planting.
Does this apply to Spain and France?
Lessons were learned from the devastating 1939 Black Friday wildfires in Australia – namely cut firebreaks and clear undergrowth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_bushfires
But then the eco-loons stopped doing it because it might upset some animals – many of whom have now burned to death.
Every time the is a major fire event in Australia there is an Inquiry.
And every time the results are the same – cut firebreaks, clear undergrowth and ground litter, and every time the recommendations are ignored. Instead of about 10% of the forests being subject to cool mosaic burns less than 2% are, and so the litter and under story build up.
Meanwhile winter fires started by lightning get crews sent out to extinguish them, and eventually we get a nice hot spell after a couple of good wet years, a hot wind comes in out of the centre of the continents, and bingo, we have mega fires.
The “protect / preserve the wildlife” excuse by governments of all levels is mostly cover for their glee at being able to withhold any funding for fire fuel reduction measures.
Vast areas of national parklands have been locked up, no access for any purposes by anyone, and just left to build up fuel and burn whenever a random lightning storm turns up.
Then of course, followed by much hand-wringing and promises of more “inquiries”, after having ignored the findings for better forest management that the previous 6 inquiries recommended.
Absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Canada has warmed by +1.7C in the past ~50 years thanks to increased greenhouse gas concentrations, the largest producer of which over that period was the US.
Not according to clear and obvious data from NASA.
Pseudo-named GHG’s DO NOT cause any warming.
All atmospheric warming in this century has occurred from increases in absorbed solar energy feeding into 3 major El Nino events.
CO2 is good.
The only thing the greenhouse gases have done is to increase the growth rate of these forests. Learn a bit about science before you pronounce untruths about the falsity of human generated warming outside urban centres.
What do you mean? The heated (hah!) debate about AC in europe can’t have anything to do with global warming happening as predicted. The Fires? Means nothing. WUWT in alarm mode publishing articles to advice people not to trust their lying eyes at an ever faster rate? Just coincidence.
There is ice in my freezer – checkmate climate alarmist!
“debate about AC in Europe can’t have anything to do with global warming happening as predicted.”….
Correct.. Just common sense starting to happen in France. France has always had very warm summers, especially in the cities.
Fires.. a warm weather event followed by arsonists. Other places around the same latitude had colder than usual periods. I heard that over 200 people have now been arrested for starting fires.
FT ??? You seem to have bnDS. !
Do earthly/regional/global temperatures fluctuate over time? Why do they?
unfortunately, several data sources indicate that the moderate warming of Canada’s boreal forests has only been about 3 degrees F over the last century. There are still no corn crops in Canada’s Red River Valley of the North like there are in it’s sister Minnesota River Valley (the valley or the Jolly Green Giant). Canadians are still stuck with Winter Wheat and Potatoes. My dream of Coconut Palm beaches in Hudson Bay has not yet materialized. It’s not yet time to buy up the beach front property since the Polar Bears might revolt and damage the beach chairs.
Corn has been engineered to grow further north and with less water. My kin grow it occasionally in ND but wheat and barley pay better.
Wow, that CO2 went and attacked Canadia!
lolololol! Go eat some bark.
Almost as if someone in Canadian government wants massive wildfires.
Newsom has not implemented the forest management which was authorized in California. As a result of his ineptitude, our forests are filled with fuel like in Canada. This has led to larger and much more intense forest fires.
That didn’t start with Gruesome. Started way back when tree huggers were protecting the California Spotted Owl from loggers. Owls can’t fly to the next their tree is attacked, and so died, almost to the point of extinction (only a few tens of thousands, not counting the genetically identical Oregon Spotted Owl). It was determined the owls could fly perfectly well in heavy smoke (zero visibility) with no damage to their lungs or nests from massive forest fires. Or at least that’s a natural form of death, so it doesn’t harm the owl population.
The Sierra Club and the Audubon Society have been proving that their members share an IQ point. The first paragraph was sarcasm; this last paragraph is guilty of a smidgen of hyperbole.
Temperatures in Southern California could rise as high as 48°C.
Could.
18 C is code yellow? Wow.
Conifers are the terminal forest in most of Canada. Certainly in the west.
The spraying is to protect planted trees. Birch and polar choke them out if they are not suppressed. Maybe tree planting has been overdone, for sure. It is often required by the province.
Spray or not, the forest ends up conifer over the long term. My opinion is that much more harvesting is needed in my region. Planting is not needed where I am. It is impossible to stop tree growth here.
Before 1930 Native Americans in New Mexico would carefully set fires in the Gila wilderness. A picture from 1930 showed clear view of the ground. 50 years later that same location was a bushy undergrowth.
‘Eighty‑nine percent of Canada is Crown land’
Oh dear, typo: that should read, ‘Eighty‑nine percent of Canada is Clown land’.
Okay; that was funny.
Some of these critics have trouble reading maps. If they could they’d find that many areas where wildfires originate are uninhabited and don’t have any road access. So how are fires there supposed to be controlled unless there’s some magic formula that can prevent lightning strikes. Mind you, Canadian federal and provincial governments haven’t been renowned in consistent forest management, but the same can be said for recent fires in northeastern Minnesota,, Montana, Idaho and Washington state. In addition, the worst period for wildfires in western North America has been shown to be the mid 1800s, but better land use for ranching, farming and overall human settlement greatly alleviated the problem as populations spread westward.
This is BS and the story should be removed.
Canada sprays about 1000 sq km of forest with glysophate per year. That is about .03% of all of Canada’s forests. Further, the big fires that caused most of the smoke were in the Northwest Territories, which don’t spray their forests at all.
Deterioration of Canada’s forestry is also being accelerated by domestic policy. Rising carbon taxes on diesel and gasoline – critical fuels for logging, hauling, and mill operations – have increased costs across the supply chain. Well thank the lord for that! They’re making it colder out!! So virtuous.