With Canada now past three million hectares burned, nearly 1,000 active wildfires from the Atlantic provinces to British Columbia, and entire First Nations communities fleeing with no warning or evacuation plans, the Green Party of Canada today renewed and escalated a call it first made three years ago: that the federal government establish a National Climate Emergency Task Force. This time, the Greens are challenging Prime Minister Mark Carney to make it an all-party, non-partisan body, because the climate emergency is bigger than any one government or party.
The Green Party first proposed a National Climate Emergency Task Force in September 2023 in the immediate aftermath of the worst wildfire season in Canadian history, when over 18 million hectares burned, smoke reached New York and Europe, and more than 200,000 people were forced from their homes. The party warned then that such a body would make the difference between life and death. Three years on, that warning has been vindicated season after season: 2025 burned over 4.6 million hectares, and 2026 is now on a trajectory that fire scientists find alarming, not for its totals alone but for the speed of its escalation.
“On June 18, 2019, the House of Commons adopted a motion recognizing that Canada is experiencing a climate emergency,” said Elizabeth May, Green Party Leader. “We proposed this Task Force in 2023, after a season that shattered every record in the books. We were told, in effect, to wait. Canadians have now waited through three more years of fires, floods and heat, and hundreds of preventable deaths. Prime Minister Carney’s answer to the hottest year in Canadian history has been to cut the very departments that keep Canadians safe, while announcing new pipelines in the same breath as he acknowledges ‘biblical weather.’”
This year, what began as a far-below-average season erupted into a national emergency in the span of ten days. Area burned was less than half the ten-year average on July 7, and just ten days and over 300 new fires later it had surged past that average entirely. Canada has now surpassed three million hectares burned, with nearly 1,000 fires burning nationwide. Ontario is enduring the worst wildfire season in its history, with more than 1,600 First Nations residents displaced, and a firefighter has died in Annapolis County, Nova Scotia, a stark reminder that the threat is no longer confined to the boreal west. At the peak of the smoke event, more than 100 million people across at least 18 U.S. states were under air quality alerts.
The worst may be yet to come. Environment and Climate Change Canada’s own forecasts point to above-average temperatures across much of the country through August, with dry conditions expected in regions including Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. Every scientific projection tells us these seasons will grow more frequent and more intense as the climate warms. Fire scientists have called 2026 a litmus test, noting that Canada has never before endured three catastrophic fire years in a row. That threshold is now being crossed. What was unprecedented in 2023 is becoming the baseline, and the country is still planning, budgeting and governing as though each disaster is a surprise.
Cutting capacity in the middle of a crisis
Instead of preparing for this intensifying future, governments are disarming. The Carney government has asked Environment and Climate Change Canada to cut its budget by $43 million in 2024-25, $63 million in 2025-26, and $91 million annually starting in 2026-27, amounting to $1.3 billion by 2030, with 840 positions at ECCC on the line. Public service unions have warned that cuts at Natural Resources Canada will decimate wildfire and flood tracking capacity, along with expertise on forest health, while cuts at ECCC will target the scientists, engineers and policy experts whose work supports weather forecasting. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister’s first budget prioritized $30 billion for defence and security.
The pattern repeats provincially. In 2025, Ontario allocated $135 million to wildland firefighting but actual costs reached $271 million by season’s end; for 2026-27, in the face of that record, Premier Doug Ford budgeted just $150 million. Frontline firefighters lack the crews and helicopters to respond where they are needed, and First Nations communities say they were abandoned without warning, support or evacuation plans.
“Thus far, the foundation of Canada’s disaster preparedness hinges on personal responsibility. But as the threats worsen with climate change, relying on individual abilities alone will not suffice,” said Dr. Farrukh Chishtie, Green Party Environment and Climate Change Critic. “Residents are told to prepare for 72 hours of self-reliance while entire communities burn, and evacuees wait weeks in shelters far from home. We warned in 2023 that Canada was unprepared for the disasters already arriving. Since then the disasters have intensified exactly as the science predicted, and the preparation has gone backwards. Reactive governance is not a plan. It is an abdication.”
“Look at what this government accomplishes when it actually wants something built,” Chishtie added. “On July 2, in the middle of a national wildfire emergency, the Prime Minister stood beside Premier Smith to announce a $35 billion, million-barrel-a-day pipeline. Weeks later, Enbridge broke ground on the Sunrise expansion in British Columbia, the first new oil and gas infrastructure to start construction under this government. The Prime Minister has now conceded that Canadian emissions will rise in the coming years. Ottawa can assemble provinces, corporations and billions of dollars in weeks for fossil fuel expansion, yet after seven years of a declared climate emergency it still cannot assemble a national plan to warn, evacuate and protect Canadians. We are asking the Prime Minister to apply that same determination to keeping people alive. An all-party, non-partisan Task Force takes the politics out of survival.”
What the Task Force would do:
The Green Party proposes that the House of Commons strike an all-party National Climate Emergency Task Force, with the federal government taking the lead given the national scope of the threat, working alongside provincial, territorial, municipal and Indigenous governments. It must include First Nations, Inuit and Métis voices from the outset, an urgent necessity given that the majority of this summer’s evacuees are from First Nations communities, and bridge Environment and Climate Change Canada, Health Canada, Public Safety Canada and Natural Resources Canada. Its mandate would include:
Universal, climate-ready warning systems that do not depend on mobile technology or the power grid, including standardized siren protocols, public education, and an amplified role for amateur radio operators. Cellular service fails, land lines go down and power goes out precisely when warnings are needed most. This summer, First Nations in northern Ontario received no evacuation orders at all.
National surge capacity for firefighting and evacuation, addressing the chronic shortages of crews, aircraft and trained water bomber pilots that provinces have acknowledged but failed to fix, and ending the practice of budgeting for the fire seasons of the past rather than the ones ahead.
Climate vulnerability assessments and adaptation strategies for municipalities that lack the financial and human resources to conduct them.
Low-cost, life-saving heat response measures, sharing best practices such as the revised BC first responder protocols developed after the 2021 heat dome that killed 619 British Columbians.
Protection and restoration of federal climate science capacity, reversing cuts that leave Canada blind to the hazards accelerating around it.
“It goes without saying that active climate mitigation remains essential,” said Chishtie. “Canada must end fossil fuel expansion and subsidies and redirect those investments toward renewable energy and adaptation. Every pipeline announced during a wildfire emergency is a commitment to more emergencies.”
“In 2023 we said this Task Force would save lives. Nothing in the three years since has weakened that case; everything has strengthened it,” concluded May. “The climate crisis requires us to work collaboratively, across party lines and across jurisdictions. We challenge Prime Minister Carney and every party in the House to embrace that spirit, strike this Task Force, and save lives. Canadians cannot afford another year of governments that treat each catastrophe as a surprise.”
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