Wildfires and their impact have been the topic of conversation as thick smoke and haze rolled into southern Ontario from the hundreds of active forest fires burning in the north. Warm, dry weather plus several lightning strikes made the perfect storm for the situation to develop.
“It’s actually very interesting if you look at the fire map, and you look at where all the fires started. You can actually see it almost in an arc in the way that the storm front was moving through northwestern Ontario,” said Mike Harris, MPP for Kitchener-Conestoga and Minister of Natural Resources.
About a week after the more intense fires started, more than 150 fire crews are continuing to respond to the 190 active fires across the province. This includes 120 aircraft, with 80 helicopters and waterbombers and around 700 boots on the ground.
“Mother Nature has been a little bit helpful over the last couple of days, delivering some rain to the north. So still a very precarious situation, but we’ve now got a bit of an opportunity to do some more suppression work now that some of the smoke has started to subside a little bit,” said Harris.
As people try to make sense of the forest fire situation, conflicting views have arisen about government investment toward the issue.
For the current fire season, the province set a starting base budget of $150 million. Critics point out that this is vastly lower than the $271 million Ontario actually spent to fight fires during the previous season. They say that the lower initial budget means fewer full-time staff, lower wages and insufficient resources secured before the season peaks.
However, Harris stressed there have been no actual budget cuts. Instead, the province is technically starting at a higher baseline budget than previous years.
“To be very clear, there are no cuts, zero cuts. In fact, since 2018, since we took government, we have actually doubled the base funding. It’s gone from about $70 million up to $150 million now as our base funding,” said Harris, adding that on top of that, depending on how severe the fire year is, the province can go to the Treasury Board to get a top-up on the amount of money they need for their response.
“I think since 2018 we’ve spent about $1.5 billion on forest-fire fighting efforts… so, no cuts.”
The confusion about budget cuts comes from how the natural disasters budget operates. The government operates on a “spend-as-needed” model for natural disasters. The province emphasizes that the $150 million figure is merely a technical starting baseline required for annual financial documentation. Typically, the province will spend more than this. In 2025’s budget, Ontario allotted $135 million for its Emergency Forest Firefighting fund; however, it ended up spending double that, $271 million, according to this year’s budget.
The unpredictability of wildfire season is the primary driver behind using the spend-as-needed budget model.
“Our actual folks who kind of run those three- or four-person crews, four- or five-person crews, to actually work on compensation with them, and they’re actually getting paid more now, as well. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about what’s going on. No cuts. We’ve actually been able to recruit a lot more people over the last few years, which is great. I think we’ve brought on somewhere in the neighbourhood of about 150 new staff. So we’re bolstering things up, obviously, as we see some more severe seasons kind of ahead of us, and our teams do an incredible job,” said Harris.
While Harris says there are no overall trends for wildfires in Ontario, he noted that some weather changes in northern winters are contributing to ripe conditions for the fire season.
“I would say in the last couple of years, in particular, though, the northwest over the winter hasn’t gotten as much snow as the northeast, and it’s been a lot warmer and drier through the spring. So that’s why over the last couple of years, for example, we’ve seen a lot more fires in the northwest than we see in the northeast, because they’ve got over the last couple of years quite a bit of snow and sort of a wet drizzly spring. It’s kind of changed a little bit over those last couple years in that respect.”
Looking to the future, Harris said the province is always considering ways to improve their wildfire response.
“Every year after we get through the fire season, usually through the winter, we always look back and see what can we do better, what can we change, what worked really well, what can we emulate. We look at other provinces, other jurisdictions, to see what they’re up to, but we have a very well trained and well-equipped fire service here in Ontario. This year is just unprecedented,” said Harris, adding that he feels there are already good policies in place for forest fire management. However, this year, dealing with so many fires at once, so close to different communities, has stretched resources thin, making the situation challenging to deal with.
