Autogenerated Transcript (0:00 - 0:35) In July of this year, 30% of the town of Jasper, Alberta was destroyed by a wildfire, and the blame for that could be laid squarely at the feet of Trudeau's Liberal government. Parks Canada had years of warning from forestry management professionals that the Alberta forests surrounding Jasper were a tinderbox, a super fire just waiting to happen. At least one registered professional forester told them that it was not a matter of if, but when. (0:36 - 1:07) Hundreds of thousands of hectares of dead forest, killed by pine beetle infestations after proven means of curbing the damage caused by these insects, were ignored. A complete lack of preparedness of forest fire services in the national park that left them unable to respond to the fire in an effective manner. Fire hydrants in Jasper, the threads of which were non-standard, preventing outside firefighting services to assist in saving the town. (1:09 - 1:38) And the list of willful negligence continues. Ken Hodges and Emile Begin are registered professional foresters, with 90 years of combined experience between them in forestry management. In this extensive interview, Ken and Emile answer some very direct questions about the mismanagement of this largely preventable disaster, and warn that even now, the government has learned nothing. (1:40 - 3:50) It will happen again. Ken, Emile, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thank you. Now, Ken, you were kind enough to contact me a couple of weeks ago after, on my Friday news report, I talked about the suspicious circumstances surrounding the Jasper fires. Evidence that the government badly bungled it, possibly on purpose. And you then contacted me, as you and Emile are fire experts, forestry fire experts, and you've been warning Parks Canada and the government now for years that this was coming. And you sent me a timeline document that goes all the way back to 1985, when they knew there was a problem. 2004. 2017, as far as I'm, if I'm getting my timeline correct, you started directly warning the government that this wasn't just a matter of if, it was a matter of when. So please catch our viewers up on how you knew this was coming. Well, first of all, we're not fire experts. We are professional foresters with a fair amount of experience. Between the two of us, almost 90 years. We've worked on fires. We've worked on silviculture. We've done a number of things. Emile is exceptionally good at the beetle component. And how we got involved, we used to, I taught downhill skiing in Jasper at Mermin Ski Hill for quite a few years. And I kept seeing the beetles grow and grow and wonder what was happening. And then all of a sudden there was a big explosion in a number of red trees that were present. I got concerned. Emile was out there, him and I got talking. We both lived in Prince George at the time. So we ended up kind of thinking about what we can do. Maybe we should let them know exactly what they're up against. We fought beetles in Prince George in British Columbia for many years, probably since 1997 when they exploded due to lack of cold weather. (3:51 - 4:48) Minus 40 for five days. That's what they need to control, the beetle populations. They weren't getting that. So one of the things that we did is we wrote a number of letters, a couple to Nurse Jo McKenna at the time. And she finally responded to us. And we certainly had a number of meetings with Parks Canada as well, the staff in Jasper. And it came to us very clearly and very quickly that they're surely over their heads in this stuff, in dealing with the beetles. I don't think they could manage the beetles or control the beetles. There was just so much coming out of BC. And then from there, we just, they had to know exactly what was coming at them because this was writing on the wall. It wasn't a matter of if it was going to happen, it's a matter of when it was going to happen. So in 2024, July 22nd, they had to make a fire. (4:48 - 5:02) And it wasn't Sue saying or anything else. It was saying the factors that were out in the field, that that is where we do all our work. That told us exactly what was going to happen. (5:02 - 5:25) It doesn't take a rocket science to do that. I've been on a number of programs, and both Emile and I have been in the media. And one of the things they keep saying, we're scientists, and we're researchers. We're neither. We're professional foresters who use the knowledge that comes from scientists and researchers to do our job. They are very focused on what they do. (5:25 - 7:40) We're much more broader. We look across the landscape, and we manage it accordingly. So that's kind of where we've been and what we've been doing. And we do care a lot about Jasper because we spent a lot of time there. We feel so badly for the people of Jasper, losing their place when this could have been avoided. Yes. Now, Emile, as Ken says, you're the pine beetle expert. And in this timeline that Ken sent to me, I saw some statistics that I personally found very alarming. 2015, 122 hectares affected. By 2016, we're over 21,000. Then we fast forward to 2018, a million hectares. Now, there's no question that the fires were much, much worse because of all that dry wood that had been killed by the pine beetles. The question, Ken and Emile, is how could this have prevented? You can't stop a locomotive that we have 3,500 years of published history as occurring. I've worked with people in Kootenay Park, and they were able to get mud core samples in lakes to going back 4,000 years that didn't get published. But it did confirm the mountain pine beetle has been in California, British Columbia, Alberta, our national parks, for at least 3,500 years, and 4,000 not easily. So, that's information that I learned because I started dealing with a pine beetle in East Kootenay in 1979. I learned about it from my instructor in 1975 at tech school. He developed this survey methodology. And the pine beetle, the first hint of it, this recent one, started in BC in 1972. We met with parks planners in 1981 when I was in Invermere. They were warned about Waterton. That was 1981. So, that was a while back. So, there is a considerable amount of history and knowledge on the pine beetle. (7:41 - 8:02) And in the East Kootenay, that was my job for 25 years from 1979 to 2003 to try and understand, learn, and work with the pine beetle. We did. We used pheromones. We did partial harvesting. We knew what the pine beetle could do, what was coming. It came into the BC central plateau. (8:03 - 8:56) It came into the Rockies, into the East Kootenay. It flew from Vernon all the way to Cypressville, Saskatchewan. And that was through DNA studies that were done independently. It was in Latnam, I still said. So, there is a very massive amount of historic research, credible, pre-reviewed, that I've been able to read and experience firsthand in the Rockies and the East Kootenay. So, the Parks Canada group were informed. They had information. It was respectfully offered. We took the experts' advice from people, some of the experts I worked with. Some of them, they were PhD students. We knew what was coming. So, as we offered, it was a matter of when, not if. (8:57 - 10:00) It was up to the management in Parks Canada and the ministers at the federal level to deal with it, because Parks is under a different jurisdiction than Alberta. It's kind of a little complicated. But yes, they were aware of it. It's just that, as Ken has often said and observed as I, Parks is pretty good at dealing with people and tourists, but they don't have anybody in forest management. They are trying to balance with ecosystem specialists, caribou, people, and forests, but the people are winning out and everything else is not. There's a strategic report that we picked up, discovered here the last couple of weeks from 2020 in Alberta about the pine beetle. They knew about it in 1899. It was coming into the east end of Jasper at the gate, East Gate. I hope they paid their pass, but they were in there early. (10:00 - 11:38) They came from BC, multiple points, Highway 93. They came up over Prince George. There's several passes. So, there was a lot of beetle pressure on the parks, and that whole area is old pine, which has a whole other history to it. So, I was going through the numbers. You were talking about the expansion. 2013, they show 123 hectares. 2019, 229,000 hectares, 230,000 hectares, basically. So, from 2012, basically, which is when the trees would have been attacked, to 2019, the beetles grew from 123 hectares a year, 6,000 hectares a year, 15,000 hectares a year, 27,000, 44,000. When I got into the intramural, we were dealing with 21,000, and with weather and the biology, we were able to work with nature and drop it down to 1,000 hectares a year. When our office was closed in 2003, it only took six years for that 1,000 hectares to go over 40,000 hectares. So, we had a pretty good knowledge base on what the pine beetle was doing, and I'll get it back to you and Ken, because I spent way too much time understanding and learning about the beetles, and I could dive into it with a great deal of depth. (11:38 - 14:36) All right. Now, Ken, I am going to come back to you, because, Emile, you have given us an education here, not just a background, but an education. It's been debated among whether or not these pine beetles have always been here or they came in from somewhere else. But as you pointed out in one of your documents, pine beetles can cover up to 100 kilometers flying under proper conditions, which says to me, and you also pointed out, we've got mud samples from 4,000 years ago that show that there were pine beetles here then. Whether they were here in the seventies or not doesn't matter because the amount of ground they can cover showing up sooner or later was inevitable, and they have been here before. But as far as we can see, historically, they have not caused this kind of massive forest fire damage. And so the question I have for Ken and for you, Emile, if you want to weigh in on it, have we not caused this problem ourselves by putting out the naturally occurring fires that normally would have controlled these populations? You're absolutely right on as well. Parks Canada has admitted to in their documents of 70 years of battling fires, and therefore, well, all they had was maximum two hectares, and they're pretty proud of that. And you know, they did a really good job at firefighting, but they missed the overall perspective of what was going to happen by doing that. The fires provide a dynamic across the landscape, resulting in old mature trees that end up dying, falling down, creating a huge fuel load. And that result creates an opportunity for mountain pine beetle to come into play. And that in itself really kind of drives what is happening. Beetles fly, they came from BC, you don't get the winter kill. And again, when that happens, they just explode. And Amelia will give you a bit of a history on some of that stuff and an education of it. And the age of these trees is probably 130, 140 years, and pine culminates at 80 to 100 years. And here we're way beyond that, since the last fire in the late 1800s, early 1900s. So you kind of look at that aspect and you've got a real explosive situation for beetles. And then once that happens, you have an explosive situation for a massive fire, which occurred. It's unfortunate that they were not able to manage the beetles to control them. There was no way they could do that. They could manage them to a point, but there are so many and so much reproduction of these beetles. It just resulted in a massive sea of dead trees throughout the landscape. And when you have that, you have conditions weather-wise, which you cannot control, but you can manage the fuel. (14:37 - 17:51) And they did not want to do that. So there's all sorts of implications around not managing the fuel. And one of them showed up this past summer. Yes. And in regards to not managing the fuel, you sent me a number of photographs, aerial photographs of the forest, and there's massive swaths of red trees, which of course are characteristic of having been killed by pine beetles. Emile, your opinion on the fact that we caused this? Ken covered it nicely. In 2016, Parks Canada did a mountain pine beetle management plan report. Page seven, second paragraph from the bottom, they offered that 70 years of fire prevention management, putting fires out, contributed to making a massive area of food for the pine beetle. So they've admitted in that 2016 report that their management actions, putting out fires, has contributed to that beetle. They're bound by UNESCO. Our national parks are World Heritage sites, and they're under UNESCO, United Nations management to some degree. It's a federal obligation, not a provincial one in the national parks. Their methods is to maintain ecological integrity, but I think they lost the point of the dynamic nature of forests and beetles, and they miss that completely from what I can see. And there's now at least 230,000 hectares of dead pine based on Parks Canada's numbers, and we're not sure about them, not certain, because Parks Canada hasn't released a lot of that information. And they've said that they're not going to be releasing a lot of FOI information until May of 2025. So the photos that I think Ken sent you are the ones, aerial shots that were made available from various hikes into the hills that Ken and I both did, and from a sky cam on the 360 camera. And that was from 2018. We could see and estimate that the pine beetle impact was being underestimated in 2017, 2018. We could see that. That's why we kind of stepped up, because it was obvious from our perspectives. So 40,000 hectares burned up roughly. We still get 170,000, 180,000 hectares of dead pine beetle killed forests, and if that fire comes in from the west this time, prevailing winds, so it was around 24 kilometers from the Jasper Park gate to the town, they're going to lose that west side. The fire that came up from the south came up faster than they ever thought was possible. We learned that the hard way in Kelowna, and fires in there. (17:51 - 20:20) And as Ken has pointed out in the past, there's a magic formula, 30-30-30. And I'll let Ken explain that. But the part with, BC used to have a five class fire hazard rating, and five being the highest for fires. We had to make a sixth rating, because pine beetle fires surprised everybody. Huge, massive fires. So yeah, the parks has known, 2016 is when they said that they were going to work on it more. They've known since 1999. But their graphs that they've sent us, that we've been able to find, show that by 2016, the pine beetle was increasing at around 40,000 hectares a year. You can't control that, and you can manage it to some degree, but good luck with the battle of the beetles and fighting it. You can't beat nature. And just before we move back to Ken, I just want to confirm, 2017, they knew. You and Ken warned them. The Mayor of Jasper warned them. Well, we warned the Mayor of Jasper as well, and he was kind enough to ask a question. What do two foresters from BC think you have to offer? You don't even live in Jasper. We have experts. Thank you, but we've already got this. So- The point is, they knew seven years ago, with two forestry management experts warning them, people with 90 years of experience between you, who has seen this happen before, and you warned them. There is a powder keg sitting here waiting to go off, and they did essentially nothing, as far as I can see from the timeline I was sent. That's what I see as well, and Ken can go into that as well. We both saw that, but everything that we shared with them, we shared with the depth of experience that we have, the concerns, and that's part of the reason why we got into forestry, not to be experts, but to be able to work in the forest and to learn with the patience of many experts and mentors to help us understand, and we saw it ourselves because we lived pretty much every day. (20:21 - 22:05) Like 25 years in Invermere, I was out in the forest. I have a 20-day month. I was in the office four days, 16 days out in the field at all temperatures, and we learned a lot with a lot of really good people from US Forest Service as well. So the information that we shared was honestly, respectfully, and passionately shared, and yeah, their choice to win or lose, I think they made the wrong choice. Yes. Now, Ken, Emile made reference to this 30-30-30 rule. What is that? What it is, Will, or is it my mute? 30-30 relates to the weather out there, so you got 30% humidity or less during the fire season of 2024. The humidity was around 12%. Temperatures greater than 30 degrees Celsius, and the temperatures for two weeks in Jasper was over 30 degrees, and the third one is the 30 kilometers an hour of wind, and that doesn't have to be sustained, but during the fire, before the fire, they were getting 30 to 50 kilometer an hour winds. You have those three factors of weather, which you cannot control, and now you throw the fuel that exists across the man base. So you have those factors. All you need is a match or ignition system, and the ignition at that time was a lightning strike. That's what we've read and heard, and once that happens, in those conditions, the winds pick up. The fire creates its own winds. They were getting winds of 150 kilometers an hour. (22:05 - 23:18) That was because of what the fire was doing. The intensity of the fire, as a result of all the dead prime beetles, the low humidity, the high temperatures, and now the winds, it was a class six fire. As Emile pointed out, in BC, when we worked there initially, they had five classes of fuel intensity, and they created that sixth class simply because of the mountain pine beetle, and I had not been on a, I've seen the fire, but I've not fought a beetle fire, but I did talk to a number of people who I knew quite well. They said they'd never seen fire behavior like that in their careers, and it did create exactly what was predicted because of the experience we had, because of the knowledge we shared, and knowledge that was provided to us by those people who were focused in on that specific field of expertise of fighting fire. So we've got low humidity, high temperature, high winds, the formula for a perfect storm, perfect fire storm, and the official story is that it was started by a lightning strike. We'll get back to that later, as there might be another explanation, but we'll go with that one for now. (23:18 - 24:03) Now once again, if I'm reading this timeline correctly that you sent to me, July 19th, five days before Jasper burned, it was just three small fires, which they said they were managing, and yet, they also said they had other teams on standby. Why? Why would they do that when there are fires clearly threatening the town, under the perfect conditions that you laid out, Ken? Why in the world would they have had people sitting on standby when they could have been in there putting those fires out? Well, there's a couple of things there, Will, that you have to look at. The conditions that existed, the first thing is, why did you only have two initial attack crews on standby in conditions like that? You have everything you can. (24:03 - 26:22) It took them days, a couple of days of finally getting assistance from either Alberta or BC. You got to remember, those provinces are fighting their own battles with fire, and they're using all of their resources that they have to battle these fires. So Jasper, the National Parks, we're looking at, oh, we can depend upon Alberta, or we can depend upon BC. Well, how do you know there's equipment is available, tankers, fire crews, whatever? And if you decide to go outside the country, it takes that much longer to get those crews in. So in my talk to a dear friend of mine who has 39 years of fire management experience and has been all over the world dealing with fires, plus being an investigator on fires and where they start, he says the first two days, they were way behind the eight ball. They were not prepared. They should have had everything ready to go on standby with those conditions. There's no excuse for only having two initial attack crews available. That's the word we had. They may have had a little more, but it took them quite a while to get up and going the first two days. And when you have fires like that, time is of the essence. You've got to get on those things with everything you've got and nail it, because what happens is what happened in July of 24. So in essence, they weren't prepared. And it seems like fighting a multitude of fires with initial attack crews, they could probably get it up and isolated. They don't know where those fires were, but they do pretty quickly on the boys that were fighting it. And I don't envy those fellows on the ground. I think what they did was put people's lives in danger by going and fighting this stuff. And we did mention the class six fire. The way you fight that is get out of the way of it, because you're not stopping it. You're not fighting it. You're putting people's lives in danger. And that's where it got. So we just want to make sure that everybody gets out of there safely. And with the intensity of what you're calling a class six fire, and you're saying we need a new category for this because it is just so extreme. Is there any way to stop it? Nature is the only one who's going to stop that. It's just like the beetles. The only thing that's going to stop the beetles is nature. (26:22 - 28:58) So you need a change in weather. If you look at the pattern of where that fire was going, what changed the fire itself were winds out of the west. And if you look at the fire outline, you'll see a bit of a head that goes off to the east. And we looked at some photos post fire that was on one of the websites. And you can see right at the tram where the tram goes up, the fire stopped there. And the only way that could happen is if the winds were coming out of the west and pushed it back into itself. And it just continued up and burned a little bit of 30% of Jasper. It shouldn't have burned any of it. But the potential of burning all of Jasper was there. But it was the winds coming out of the west that redirected the winds, redirected the fire. And I think that's really what happened based on the design and the outline of the fire and looking at other factors across the landscape. Now, Emile, getting back to the conditions, the pine beetles that had destroyed so much forest, it was sitting there dry tinder ready to go up. Then we had this perfect storm of conditions come along, as Ken explained. We've already established that they were grossly undermanned. They've had at least eight years of warning that this was coming. Why do they only have two attack teams when they knew this was coming? But the question I have for you is, could it not have been avoided if over those past eight, 20 years, however long you want to call it, that they've known this problem was there, could they not have done controlled burns to have prevented this? Ken and I spoke about this last night. Interesting, good timing. The controlled burns that the parks likes to do mostly is east of Jasper and it's on the grasslands where it makes pretty good sense to do controlled burns. But one of the fires in the east, Vine Creek, that was started as a controlled burn, took out the whole valley and the forests and caught everybody off guard. Unfortunately, that video footage has been, I can't find it anymore. The local newspaper had a site as well, but Parks Canada has been doing some burning, but the burning that they're doing isn't helping the fires coming from the south or from the west, it's fires going to the east to hopefully help protect this community out there. (29:00 - 32:49) Will a forest fire used as a controlled burn stop or wipe out the pine beetle? There's a lady who does research in the U.S. and I just came across her paper again just yesterday, who has offered with her research and I spoke with her years ago when I was in Inderwere in the East Kootenays. You have to get the bark burned hot enough either right off the tree or at least beyond the scorching that the bark protects the trees. And leaving in those forests and Douglas fir is at the northern extent in Jasper where pine can, you know, it'll pick all those niches up. So would a controlled forest fire have stopped the pine beetle? It would have reduced it but it would not have stopped it because the bark protects the larvae under the pine trees or once the tree's been attacked. So you're going to get limited control from that. The only apparently functional way to reduce the beetle population is using harvesting and you can do selective harvesting or beetle proofing as it was identified by Mark McGregor, Gina Mann, Dennis Cole, researchers from the states who came up and spent some time helping me understand this. That was something they learned from the 1920s out of California when they were doing falling and burning of beetle attack trees, red trees initially, which doesn't have the beetle in it. The green attack trees that you have to find and you got to look for them and you got to know what you're looking for. They have the beetles in it. So if you're only responding to red attack and gray attack trees and that's red needles or no red needles on the tree and most of the needles are gone, the beetle already left. You got to find the beetle where it is, you got to know where it lives and then you got to take it out when it's in the tree. And we can do that with pheromone tools that were developed in the states in 1977, expanded on by Dr. John Borden and Simon Fraser in the 1980s. We got our first pheromones to manage, to learn how to use them and manage pine beetles in 1981. And that was expanded on by Dr. Hal Weiser, Dr. Liz Dixon, Dr. Bill Laidlaw, University of Calgary. I spent years working with them, experimenting, them being the experimenters, me being the tree grunt. We learned that we could use pheromones to manage pine beetles and fir beetles and spruce beetles. We could do selection harvesting, thinning from below, coined as beetle proofing. That was applied in the Golden Forest District in Vermeer and Cranbrook. Could have been applied relatively well in some parts of Jasper, but in other areas the terrain, no you wouldn't have been able to do anything except let the fires burn and hope that you have anchor points, lake slides, rock slides, lakes to help slow down or stop the fire from burning. But you would have needed a whole different skill set from burning grass fires to get into controlled burns with fires and in partially logged stands. Parks just didn't have that skill set. You need a forester who's been exposed to that or several. We had range experts in Invermeer. We had fire experts. (32:50 - 33:14) I played with, well they weren't experts, they were technicians, they were foresters, but they had gained a knowledge of experience. We can do spring control burns in grasslands to slow down the forest movement into the grassland area, the encroachment. We used to do years ago control burns in the mountains after logging, but that was stopped because too much smoke. (33:15 - 33:31) So parks didn't have the knowledge, the skill set, or the tools. They were all available. They all existed way before Ken and I learned about them, but that opportunity to apply them, that door was closed before it was even allowed to be opened. (33:32 - 36:11) Okay. Now gentlemen, I'm going to allow you to educate both myself and the viewing audience because everything you've said has left me with certain questions and I want to start with a baseline question. Theoretically, and this is very much theoretically, I realize, if it were not for the presence of the pine beetles, would we have lost half of Jasper? That's a tough question to answer. It would have been probably easier to control because the green is harder to burn, but it can burn if the conditions are right. However, let's use a simple example everybody can relate to. Put yourself in the campsite, you've got two campfires going. One, you're using green wood. You get a live tree and you've got the parses of it, you've created your kindles and all the rest of it. On the other one, you use dry wood. So when you do that, what would you expect to happen on the green wood? Smoke, it's slow, it's not going very quickly. If you can get it to light at all. Yeah. I think a lot of experience camping with our kids. If you can't find some dead wood, you're going to have a heck of a time. Yeah. Now if you've got that dry dead wood and you ignite it, what happens? It burns quickly. You get a lot of flame and you can create a huge fire from that. Now put that into perspective of a landscape and you have all dead wood and what happens there? We've seen what happens. There's other fires that you have that I've seen and I've fought for many years and if the conditions are right, it's going to burn, but not burn as hot or as fast or as intense as a stand of dead wood. So if you look at the fires that you tried at your campsite and put that at the landscape level, what's going to happen? And again, if things are dry, they're going to burn. If you have a long period of 30 degrees, you got your winds, low humidity, you got your ignition source, it's going to burn. It's going to burn consistently. You're going to get some candling, you're going to get a bit of crown burning, but most of it will stay on the ground. And as they get bigger, they start creating their own environment as well. So that gets a little scary. But to answer your question, they won't burn as intense or as fast as what we saw in Jasper. They talked about, they saw a firestorm, there's only a couple of records of it according to Parks Canada staff and it had tornadoes in it. (36:12 - 36:22) That was a hot fire and it was moving. So I don't think you would get the same effect with greenwood, at least from my experience. Okay. (36:22 - 38:35) Do I say that it is highly likely that it would have been much, much easier to control this fire to prevent Jasper from burning if it had not been for all the deadwood from the pine beetles? I think the pine itself, the dead pine contributed to the intensity and the spread of the fire, whereas the green would not have been the same. The deadwood created such conditions that the winds were, they said 150 kilometres an hour. And I don't think you would see that with the green standing wood. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but the chances are much lower with the green timber. Yes. And I've seen videos of fire tornadoes and I got to tell you, it's absolutely terrifying. Now, since we have now established that, that while we can't say for an absolute certainty, it is highly likely that if we didn't have all that dead forest out there, that this fire could have been controlled, would never have burned the city. So, and once again, I'm going to ask you gentlemen to educate me. Emil, you've already made reference to the fact that using pheromones and such, there's ways to control these populations, but let's assume that wasn't done. Let's assume we've got that current condition with all those photographs that Ken sent to me with huge swaths of red trees dead from pine beetles. Now, this is where truly I'm going to ask you to educate me gentlemen, because I'm about to postulate an idea that occurs to me and maybe it's unrealistic. Maybe it just wouldn't work. I don't know. So the idea I would have, and I'm obviously no forestry expert, no firefighting expert, but it seems to me that if you were to go out there and you were to cut fire breaks around those huge swaths of dead trees, and you were to wait until the conditions were absolutely not right, not anywhere near that 30, 30, 30, so instead you've got high humidity, you've got low temperatures, you've got zero wind, and maybe you even pick a day where the weather forecast says, we're going to have heavy rain in the next 24 hours. And now you go when you start that fire to burn up that dead wood before it can contribute to a super fire like this one. (38:36 - 39:50) Would that not work? It's interesting as you brought that up, because you talked earlier about burning and managing the beetles. You can burn to eliminate the fuel hazard as well. However, some of the things that are even better when you have the dead wood is that you can get value out of that dead wood and you're better off to log it. The key to it is breaking up the fuel across the landscape. Parks did a great job around the town of Jasper, but it was in a micro view instead of a macro. So looking at the landscape and figure out how can we manage this. And one thing is you have to make sure the conditions are right. And when you're getting close to communities and you're doing burning, it gets extremely, I guess scary is the best word, because the winds in the mountains can change on the bat of an eye. So you've got to be very careful. Even you can have a kilometer, that fire can jump if it gets enough heat, it can jump over that kilometer and start a fire on the other side of that. And it was done in the Okanogan Lake. So you have to be very careful. (39:50 - 41:17) You're almost better off to try and log portions of that and allow the rest to sit. And if it does burn, it burns. But if you have that swath of thousand hectares, whatever it may be, and I know the CEO for Parks says, well, do you really want a thousand hectares of clearcut? Well, you've got 40,000 hectares of burnt stands, you know, and a third of the town burnt. So why not do two things at once? Use to manage the fuel and secondly, generate revenue. So you can do those two things. But being under UNESCO, they don't want you logging. They want it left in a natural state. So that could be some of the reasons why they didn't do anything. And to burn, yes, they could burn, create a big fire guard and burn if conditions are right, allow it to go up the hill, reduce that fuel, and it would have really cut off that fire from moving into Jasper itself. And I think it's important to recognize that you have to do something. They had three choices. They could burn it, log it, or do nothing. And they chose the last option. They did nothing. For whatever reason, they have to explain themselves as to why they did nothing and allow the town to burn itself. (41:17 - 42:29) There's a whole nother theory behind that one. I think you were talking about it earlier, but it's hard to prove anything as such in relation to these theories. But we want to stay with the facts of what occurred, what options we have based on our experience, our knowledge, and go from there. Now, you mentioned UNESCO, and yeah, you've just laid out what seems to me at least to be a perfect solution. Surely there would be logging companies that would be thrilled to cut down those trees, harvest them. This could have been dealt with that way, but you're saying because of UNESCO, they couldn't do that. Could you please explain why? Well, part of the agreement that they have, and if you go through the UNESCO standards, and I do know that in other parts of the world, they have really stopped any logging from happening because of what they classify as a world-class ecosystem. And when they stop it, they lose the fact that communities are at risk. They've got to be able to do something. (42:30 - 42:43) So that could be part of the reason. I don't know if that's totally the reason. It could be just they want to maintain ecological integrity as part of the natural process, which beetles and fire are in that part of the world. (42:45 - 43:33) So as far as UNESCO goes, I've just touched the surface on that. And I don't know if Emil looked into it deeper than I have. I don't know. Emil, what do you think? Well, for talking on that, there might be other further deeper stories on who's controlling our country and forests. And those kind of theories, I could expand on some. They would speculation in some way in theories and others. But UNESCO, when we spoke, let's go back to when we spoke with Parks Canada 2017-2018, we were unable to meet the superintendent. He didn't have time for us. So we met with their other staff, and some of them were field staff, really good people. (43:34 - 43:59) Some of them were managers that had three years of experience and knowledge, and they were being asked to do a situation where, good luck when the fire hits, you're going to be the scapegoat because you messed up. We spoke with the ecologists. I won't name them, but they were appropriately named because we had interesting discussions that weren't really arguments, but they were warm discussions. (44:01 - 49:58) Parks Canada, some of their staff had been looking at trying to get some logging done in the park for four years, but they weren't even allowed to do that. And there were more complications because the way Jasper is set up, from what I've read and understand, some of their sewage treatment facilities and processes, they actually purchase pine chips hidden from one of the sawmills out there to help clean up their sewage sludge and to remove it to be able to treat that. So that's a whole deep rabbit hole down there. Parks, Jasper wasn't allowed, from my understanding and listening to people I've spoken with, Parks Canada would not allow Jasper to use any pine trees from Jasper Park for the community for some of their needs. You just don't do that. That was mandates that Parks Canada had to work under from UNESCO and from the federal government of our wonderful environment ministers. At the time it was Ms. McKenna, it's now Mr. Guilbeault. And that political interference without having knowledge as a professional forester, even any training or experience in that, created huge barriers. And when you get agreements under UNESCO or the Canada Free Trade Agreement on forest products and lumber, that impacts how we can manage our forests and our national parks. That's not speculation. Why that level of interference in Canada's forest management is allowed, that opens other doors to be expanded into that are something I can't find all the answers for, but I can sure see the consequences when they're preventing anybody all the way down to municipalities or specialized municipalities, which is what Jasper is, from doing work that they could be doing, but they're not allowed to do it in the context of UNESCO and other management agreements right up to the federal government. Could plans have been done? Yeah, when we did burning in these colonies, we spent the summer before doing a burn plan, which was built upon from previous burn plans on where we wanted to do the grassland burning or any of the enforced encroachment into grasslands. We'd have to harvest the area so that we did recover some of the value and to keep the economy going for sawmills as part of the community, we could log down so there would be 30 to 70 trees per hectare left, some slash on the ground, and in the spring when the ground is frozen, go in and burn that off, knowing what the humidities were, the winds, the climates, the weather, all that was built in and people that I worked with that were firefighting, that was their main role. Firefighters put out the fire, we're now burning in spring and if you don't get the fire out in the spring, you're going to hang over fire in the summer and you could end up being in worse situation. Could that have been applied in Jasper? Yes, I think that in some parts of it, some of the ecosystems, that was possible. One of the good things that they had up towards the Pyramid Lake area, Pyramid Benches, they had large stands of aspen and those large stands of aspen become fuel stoppers, fuel breaks to a large extent when you compare it to burning a conifer forest of pine and fir. So did Parks know the fire history in detail? BC, we had John or he mapped all the fire history of BC, so we knew that fire occurrences could be anywhere from 5 to 15 years in some areas or over 300 years in other areas. Parks has that information in some very old reports, some of it, but it wasn't current and wasn't available now because everybody that's in was too new and too young. They just didn't have the experience, they had the education, intelligent enough people, but they had the marching orders, this is Parks mandate, you're working for us. Somebody comes in and advise you otherwise, you work for us. Right. Now, so Ken, I just want to be very clear on this. If I'm understanding these UNESCO policies correctly, what they're essentially saying is you have to leave tens of thousands of hectares of dead wood sitting there that is perfect kindling for a superfire and you're not allowed to cut it down, even though it's dead and serving no purpose whatsoever. That's the reading I have done. It says you cannot use log for commercial values. You can cut it and burn it, but then we get into the climate change topic, if you wish. You'd have to read further into it, I think, well, to really get a true understanding. We've only touched the surface of it because there's been so many things that we've had to read to support our position. We have research papers from all over the world, in fact, and even the timeline that we sent you, there's a lot of reference to documents that our researchers have provided and it's important. With all the reading we've done, you got to pick and choose your battles at that point. (49:59 - 50:53) Part of the problem is UNESCO is part of NATO. They're not part of NATO, but it's a world organization. I think it's important to look at what they're trying to do. I think if you go to the deserts of Egypt or into the Middle East and you get history that is thousands of years old, I can see the preservation of that under the UNESCO. Forests, I think, might be a little different. They have to be a little more open in relation to protecting people. There's areas that you would want to do that. For example, you could put a zonation around each community and protect it and do what you have to do within that zone. It could be five kilometers, eight kilometers, 10 kilometers, depends on what the priority is and how you want to manage it. (50:54 - 52:45) Because I think it was one of the researchers, he had a paper out and he was interviewed and he says you only need 10 to 15 kilometers from town to protect it, but depends on what you do in that 10 or 15 kilometers. You're not going to clearcut it. I think that would be the wrong thing to do, but I think you could do a partial harvest, thinning it out, maintaining it as a big part of the equation. Because if you don't, then you get all the stuff, wind breakage, you get snow breakage, you get stuff lying on, you get ladders climbing up on trees, which creates a fuel hazard. So if your objective is to protect down from fires, then you want to maintain it. And that zonation, you could have portions of small clear cuts to help break up the landscape. That in itself would provide better diversity across the land base. So now you have a healthy stand, you have wildlife habitat is improved, and you can add human interaction with recreational trails in that area. And it would be a lot safer for everybody, including the towns. Now, gentlemen, I want to get into the response itself to the fire itself. I don't want to get too far into conspiracy theories to things we can't prove. But let's talk about what we do know. Let me start. I'm sure you folks are aware of a gentleman by the name of Peter MacIsaac. He's another forestry management expert. He lives in Nova Scotia. He was the one who exposed the satellite imagery of those fires a couple of years ago in Quebec that are all starting at exactly the same time. I myself have reported a number of times on data from the European Forest Fire Information Service, which showed last year, where there were record low forest fires in Europe, record low forest fires in the United States and a hockey stick in Canada. (52:46 - 53:34) We know that certain individuals have been arrested for arson for starting these fires. We know, and I'm going to make reference here to your timeline about the 2015 Spitfire system. So we have, perhaps, evidence that this fire was not natural. Your opinion? It's hard to speak to that one without actually having it investigated. Again, you can have theories all over the place, but that particular day, they had a ton of lightning strikes. So that could have, it leans more in that light than it does to have somebody go and start it. (53:34 - 53:51) But that doesn't say it didn't happen that way. But based on the information that I have, and I think Emil, the same thing, is that you have lightning strikes all over the place. You have a big storm coming through, a big front coming through, and all of a sudden the fire starts. (53:51 - 59:27) That seems more logical to us, based on our experience. We're not investigators. So we have to go in that direction. It doesn't say that this could have happened, but we have to wait for the investigators and the people looking into this to see if it was manmade. It wasn't started by somebody going out and, well, we're going to burn this thing down. We'll fix these guys. I don't know. I can't answer that. And to speculate, I got to go with what we know and what our experience pushes us in that particular direction. Emil, what do you think? Yeah, I've pushed much further into that area, Will. I've been digging into this a lot further, such as in the Paradise fires in California, Lahaina fires in Hawaii. Alberta has had convictions of arsonists. B.C. has had convictions of arsonists. Over 60% of, in some years, 60 to 80% of the fires that we've had to fight have been man-caused, not specifically intentionally arsoned, but abandoned campfires. So I was also trained on something called an aerial ignition device, where we used to do burning. We had ping-pong balls that were specially prepared that we dropped out of a helicopter. We've had drip torches that hang below a helicopter. Those are all tools that have been used and are available for a lot of years. So the resources are there. There's also a lot of speculation into other energy sources. The speculation seems to be coming valid in some areas. And there is one video clip that I did see, a short one, of the fire starting in Jasper, 27 kilometers roughly south of town. A little bit of rain. The people that took the video were driving south in their car. They didn't get the flash, but they did see the white smoke and, surprisingly, a lot of black smoke really fast. And Ken and I both responded to, worked on, lightning strikes and fires that start from spot up to 19,000 hectares. I didn't work directly on those 19,000 hectare fires. I did work on 3,000 hectare fires directly right at the front of the fire that was burning to take out InfraMirror seven miles away from my house. So I get it. I understand the concerns. I saw the fires from the satellite imagery in Quebec. Canada's getting a lot of fires in-country. Is it all from forest mismanagement or is there something else behind the scenes? I can't close the door on that because there's too much information coming out. I was trained as a fire investigator in InfraMirror. I haven't been on the ground in Jasper. Good thing because had I been there earlier, they might have said, hey, you were there. You must have started it. No, I couldn't get to Jasper. So yeah, I'm very much aware of the depth that we could go down that rabbit hole. At this point, it's not off the table, but we just don't know. Right. And I appreciate your honesty on that, gentlemen, because I don't want to get hung up on that because quite frankly, as Ken pointed out, it's not necessary. They had, and let's talk about the facts again, a minimum eight years of warning that they had the perfect conditions for this to happen. They did nothing. Another thing for your timeline, 2017, Parks Canada invested an unprecedented $3 billion over five years to support infrastructure work. But from what I could see in that document, not a dime of it was spent on fire prevention or response. This is what I agree with the worst. It's uncertain as to where the money went and they just won't provide that detail for us. We're hoping that might come out of the parliamentary committee where they've asked for some of that or freedom of information by the MPs. So there's a drive to try and get that information. And if we get it, great, but they may say, oh, we don't have any records of it, which I would really question because there would be contracts involved. So it's just a matter of time before that information comes out, but they're really dragging their heels to provide that. All right. Some of that money went to the rebuild of Whistler's campground. We think it's around 34 million and there was about 60 hectares that was logged. They cut down the trees and they didn't utilize them because my understanding is that those trees and campgrounds could have nails in them and a lot of other metal objects, which when you run through a sawmill, you got to look after the sawmill workers so you don't run that kind of wood through the mill. Had they decided to cut off the bottom 10 or 12 feet, two or three meters up, could they have utilized the residual trees for chips, for pulp, for pellets? It's a possibility, yes. (59:27 - 1:03:11) But I was driving by one day when they were setting fire to those piles. They were massive, 20, 30 feet tall that they did burn. I saw them burn. So I can speak to that from firsthand. What else was done? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I could have stepped in there, Emil. So if you're telling me, it's okay to burn them, just not while they're still in the forest. Well, yeah. So once you're in the campground and you remove the danger trees, and I was a danger tree assessor. I was also a SAR manager trained federally for eight years. So I understand there are a lot more options and just more than forestry, but yeah, they were able to burn the trees that were left in the Whistler's campground, but they couldn't send them to the sawmill because the hazards that were there, but they didn't think far enough, I guess. I don't know what their thought process was. And we did speak with them about pellets and chips, but they made their choices based within the parameters that they had. And I'm not saying it was a good idea. That's for sure. All right. So let's talk about the obvious mismanagement of the fire itself. We've already determined some things. Only two attack crews were working when, as you said, they should have been fully staffed. They should have been ready to go after this thing with everything they had. They had other fire crews on standby while these fires were growing, not addressing them. I had heard, and perhaps you can confirm this because I don't know myself, I do not have confirmation of this, that the threads on the fire hoses in Jasper are a special type and don't fit most of the hoses from outside firefighters who could have come in and helped. Is that true? That's the information we've heard as well. That was from the fire chief and the people came in from out of Jasper and they wanted to help out. And they found that the connections with the fire hydrants were not consistent with a standard equipment. And so they had to get an adapter to make it work. And they only had a limited number and it was not part of their general pieces of equipment that they would have on board their trucks. So, and I'm sorry, what I have to conclude from that, first of all, I can't imagine any reason why a municipality would do that, and especially not one that sits in the middle of a forest. One would think you want standardized equipment so that you could get outside help, but okay. So for whatever reason, they didn't have that. So the next question that occurred in my mind is if they did have that, if they did have those standardized connections, so other firefighters could have come in, if they had had more firefighters in town who could have been spraying down houses and yards and whatever, could they potentially have saved the town? I would, I doubt it. The fire was so intense. And part of the things that kind of bother me a little bit is the fact that they say it's a leader in fire smart, and yet 30% of the town burned down. So you really have to ask why. And I had a friend of mine who drove through that. I haven't seen a lot of it lately, but it drove through Jasper and he says it looked really nice, very cosmetic. And if you're going to fire smart something, you don't only take down some of the shrubbery and move the wood away from your house, but you have to look at the building code. A lot of those houses were quite old or mountain perspective of wood frames and wood siding and everything else. (1:03:11 - 1:03:25) So when that fire gets into that stuff, you've got to form a fuel. So there's a lot of material that is available out there that is fire resistant. Metal roofs is an example. (1:03:26 - 1:04:32) Instead of cedar roofs, those things can make a huge difference. Would that have helped protect the town? I think it would have. But just to remove trees to make it look good and say we were fire smarting, I think they have to go way beyond that. And one of the things you'd have to do is to do that and have that happen and have people change their siding and their roofs is provide some funding from the government. If you want to have them fire smart something, well, step up the plate and provide some funding because not everybody can afford to change the siding on their house or change the roof. It gets extremely expensive, not to mention to try and get the contractors and that into a place that is kind of more isolated than say out of Edmonton or out of Calgary. It gets to be a little more difficult. So they have to really look at the whole picture. And that's what I'm seeing more and more with Products Canada is that they are looking at a very narrow field instead of looking at the large picture and looking at the whole picture. (1:04:33 - 1:05:52) Yeah. And if I can add a little bit more to it, speaking with people in town and looking at some of the available minutes of council minute meetings, Jasper's water supply was wells. So you've got all the fire hydrants in place. Some of them are not being checked as often possibly. Some of them they have wrong fittings to the limited access fire equipment. But if you don't have enough water and if you don't have a backup system from the rivers that's functioning, because they did have some of that in place, but my understanding is that if there were a couple of houses on fire and you wanted to use the reservoir and it was full, 80 to 100% full, you might have six hours of water from the reservoir to feed those hydrants before the reservoir recharged. So hooking up to the water system to the creeks would have had to been important and there was an old system in place. We discovered that in some of the digging and researching. Those systems were totally functioning. (1:05:53 - 1:06:55) Did they get repaired? I'm not sure. To what extent? Not sure. Apparently they did get money for a high pressure water system to bring in. Was it in the ground? Was it above the ground? How far did it reach? A lot of those details need to come out. But before they can come out, you have to ask the question, did Jasper have enough water capacity if 30% of the town burned and what backup did they have? And what we heard in 2017, 2018, that was not likely going to be the case. Yes. Now, gentlemen, I want to thank you for your patience because for the last hour and 15 minutes, I have been building a foundation for the most important question of this interview. You are both forestry management experts. We've talked a lot about pine beetles and ways that they could have been dealt with, about the way the forest should have been managed, about preparations that should have been made when they had ample warning that this was coming. (1:06:56 - 1:10:50) And Ken, I'm going to ask you to start, but I'm going to ask both of you gentlemen to give your answers to this question. How should this have been managed to prevent this disaster? Well, the first thing is you've got to manage the fuel. If you know there's a fire going to happen and you've got a stand that's out there that's pretty much all dead because it was a homogeneous stand of pine, so it's one species existing, is you manage your fuel and you move it back to a point and then you break the fuel across the landscape so you can't get that fire built up to the level that it was. Because it starts, it'll build, and it'll die down because it has no more fuel. So that part is what can happen and how far along. They've got the whole valley. They've got three directions, four directions around Jasper itself. The next real issue is the west of town where the prevailing winds mainly come from. And as Emil mentioned, it's 24 kilometers to the west gate and you get a stripe from there like it did from south, 24 kilometers roughly. It'll build up because it has the same fuel structure. So they have to get rid of the fuel to avoid another catastrophic event. Well, I'm going to go back a little bit into history. It's not that I'm a details guy or anything, but back in 1890 seems to be when the last large fire hit Jasper. The archive photos from 1904, 1906, they show a train loaded with elk being unloaded in the grasslands of Jasper and they show what the forest looked like in the 1900s, 1904, 1915. If that was the ecological integrity that was going to be maintained, the forests were fragmented, they were sparse, they weren't as beautiful green carpets for miles as we have today. When Parks Canada started, they had an opportunity to set up a structure to include forest management, not just tourist management. So I think they missed the target right from day one. When in 2016 they admitted 70 years of fire suppression, Smokey the Bear is my friend too. But one thing about Smokey the Bear is that fires do burn in forests and bears are smart enough to get out of the way. Are humans smart enough to not get burned out? Apparently not and there seems to be a lot of limitations on what a natural forest, what people think a natural forest should look like. Ignoring the dynamic nature of the forest, the beetles, and we haven't even spoken about after the fire because there's going to be insects coming in after that. Black army cutworm is a possibility. In the next summer I might see that. Other engraver beetles which can build up, attack trees before the pine beetle does and you set up a scenario for another fire within another six to ten years. That's all in place that Parks Canada, nobody's spoken about but it's something Ken and I are aware of because we've lived it in the forests of BC. I've seen it, we've worked on it and the research is there to support it. So what could parks have done? Remove the political interference, I'm not right-leaning, bring in some reasonable management based on the ecosystems and over 4,000 years of knowledge. (1:10:51 - 1:20:11) That was just throwing out baby bath water, the whole thing and the paper to dry off the kid. So throw into the mix of your answers a question about UNESCO because as we were discussing earlier that crippled our response of what we could have done. So the question gentlemen is this, did this international agreement cripple us? Did it set us up to make this unavoidable or could we have prevented it even with that in place? Well that's an interesting question Will. With the UNESCO, I think it may have tied their hands because they wanted to follow it. Could they have logged it for non-commercial use? I would suspect so but they did some logging already in the park just west of town and they sold it for you know some money for it. So they got some income from logging that, they wanted to protect the town but what they've done they really haven't looked at the landscape level because those shortcuts are not going to stop the fire if it comes in. As far as their direction, could UNESCO interfere? Yeah, I truly do but they could have done some other stuff by not selling it but if you're burning it then you end up polluting the area. You've got climate change they're all concerned about so you're contributing to that. So there's just so many pieces of the puzzle and it all comes down to political interference in my books. Just like the Vine fire, it took them eight years to burn that. Oh we needed to wait for the right conditions. You can't tell me you didn't have the right conditions over eight years. The issue became they were concerned about what the public and tourists would think if you were burning and all the smoke that occurred. So it's all those type of things that are interfering with doing good forest management and that doesn't mean that you do any clear cuts here and clear cuts there. You don't do that. There's a whole bunch of strategies that you can, so culturally, to enhance the health of the stand but maintain that greenery across the landscape. You don't need to have that barren ground. It wouldn't be appealing to tourists but we just have to wait and see what transpires. But I do have a question for you, Will. What do you think they should do with the land that has been burnt, that 40,000 hectares? What do you think they should do with it? Well, being a capitalist, I think they should sell it off to forestry companies. It's already dead and it's already burnt. Yes, forestry companies would come and they'd clear it and they'd plant new trees. That's what they do. It's in their interest to plant new trees. There's got to be a cost involved in that and in my books, if they're going to keep it as a national park, they've got to diversify the landscape. If you look at the pictures and the photos that occurred in the early 1900s, as Emile has mentioned, it was grazing land and in 2013, they stopped the ability to allow fire to occur in Jasper National Park. So you end up with the stand structure that you have now. Really what I would see, because some of the site is going to be sterilized because of the heat, it burns the trees, it consumes the duff and it actually starts consuming soil. And you can get sites put back millenniums if you wish. And it takes time to get that back into production for growing trees or just about anything. And other areas, you want to encourage maybe grazeland grazing. Other areas, you let the trees come back naturally or you can plant them. But there's issues around planting as well these days. So you don't want to have a monoculture. You want to have a mixed bag of species that are ecologically appropriate for that site. And that's a big importance. So you have a diversity is what I'm suggesting across that landscape that's been burned. And the other option, yeah, so it's off to industry, let them deal with it. But that's a national park, it won't happen. Yeah. And I should clarify, and by the way, thank you, Ken, for your explanation. You're the expert, not me. I was just giving you an honest answer to what first thing that popped into my mind. And I should clarify, I wasn't advocating actually selling park land to the forestry companies, but rather giving them the rights to log there and with the provisor that they would have to replant once they did. Now, Emil, you are the pine beetle expert. Same question for you. Even with this UNESCO agreement in place, they had lots of warning. Could they have, through proper forest management, have prevented this disaster? Preventing a forest fire is like preventing the rain from falling and creating creeks and rivers and into the ocean. So let me clarify. I'm not saying could we have stopped a fire from happening. Of course not. I'm saying, could we have stopped Jasper from burning? To this massive extent, had there been forest management activities allowed on the ground, without UNESCO and political agreements, free trade agreements, even getting into that lumberside as well, we would have seen a very different fire perspective. And I'm going to add to that, Kootenay National Park burned major fires. We had let burn areas. Some of the lightning strikes started on the BC side. Some of it started around Simpsons Monument in Kootenay Park. And it burned out massive amounts in Kootenai Park. So Jasper, it's a reflection of what parks knew was going to happen based on Kootenai Park in the East Kootenai. South of Saskatchewan Crossing, massive fires in through that part of the world over the years. Parks Canada knew and had it in plain sight, lit up by the flames of fires, exactly what was going to be burning in Kootenay Park, Banff, Jasper. They know what's coming. Banff and Canmore are in the sights for this exact repeating history megafire event to occur. It's coming. It's not a matter again of if, it's a matter of when. If we're not allowed to manage our forests in Canada the way the forests and ecosystems need to be managed, and so you don't fight nature, you work with her and you learn from her. Everything that we've done, we know how to manage forests wrong, mismanage forests. Do we know how to learn how to manage forests working with nature? Yeah, there's a learning curve there, but yes, those doors are in place, that knowledge is in place. Regarding replanting, I asked specifically in Jasper if they did any cone collecting to get the seed, because it's not like you can go out to the store and buy seed to plant trees that grow in the area, and then if you add the climate change modeling, and just a heads up, trees don't grow very well in models. They grow better in the forests. But Jasper doesn't even have a plan, none of the parks have a plan to collect seed to be able to reforest with the trees that are already there, the wild seed. Instead, there's something called class A seed, which is genetically improved to make the trees grow better, but at least two seed lots in British Columbia are not resistant to diseases, to pine tree diseases. They're susceptible, more susceptible to them. So again, we know how to make forests worse. We're learning that some of that stuff is, we need to stick with some of the nature stuff, but depends on what your objective. Do you want to log trees that grow really fast that you'll never be able to log, because they're killed by the insects and diseases? Or do you want to take a little bit of time to grow trees that have had 10 to 12,000 years, Precambrian Ice Age, to adapt to those ecosystems and work with nature and grow from there? So it's not just those policies from UNESCO, it's within government policies as well, and lots of discussions on that. All right, gentlemen, my next to last question. I'm going to put you on the spot, and I want to make it clear, I want your honest answer, not the answer you think I might be looking for. Given everything that we have discussed, is there any doubt in your mind that had this whole situation been managed the way it should have been, much of Jasper would probably still be standing? Your honest thought. (1:20:12 - 1:24:09) Yes. My honest thought, yes. We could have done better, yes. Jasper didn't have to burn the way it did. My personal opinion, my 50 years, 1972 to 2022, education, learning, training, experience in the forests, a lot more digging. What happened in Jasper is what we knew was coming in 2017 and 2018. No hesitation, no political bullshit, word in my fridge. It could have been managed a lot differently, and we know that. Ken, your opinion. No, I agree with Emile. It could have been managed a whole lot differently, and if they had listened to us, or got people who understand, if they don't want to talk to us, they can talk to a lot of other people who would understand and see what's happening. It was interesting that they had talked to the Alberta Forest Service about what we were talking about, and they agreed 100% with us. They could have moved forward on this. We gave them the initial starting point of it, but then there's the next stage, because you don't know if it's going to happen tomorrow, or five or six years from now, but you take steps to make sure that you're ready for whenever it happens. Yes, they could have done a lot more than what they did. Hindsight's 20-20, absolutely. However, we saw what was going to happen, and it did happen, unfortunately. And yes, they could have protected the town of Jasper by taking appropriate actions. And they did do a lot of stuff, like I said, at a micro level, looking just around town, but not looking at what the potential was beyond that. And the result is they burned it, burned 30% of the town, and destroyed a lot of people's lives, which is unacceptable in my opinion. They should have, should have, could have, would have, I guess, but yes, they could have prevented this if they had taken appropriate actions. Then there was plenty of options to do it. All right. Gentlemen, my last question before I ask you for final thoughts you may have for our viewers, I'm going to do that before we finish. You've looked at this whole situation in depth. You've made reference in your documents you sent to me to warnings that were given to provincial government, warnings that were given to the federal government. What percentage of the blame for this mismanagement would you say should be laid at the doorstep of Parks Canada, the federal government, versus our provincial government? First off, you have to recognize where the land base is. It is not a provincial land base. It is a federal land base under a national park. And with that, the responsibility of that falls onto the government of Canada, the party that is existing right now, and which is looked after by Parks Canada. So the responsibility falls right on Parks Canada, in my opinion. It does not fall into Alberta. It's not their responsibility, even though Jasper is paying taxes to Alberta, but that's a small piece of the landscape. It's only the boundaries within the town that they have control. And anything they do in that town has to be approved by Parks Canada, the superintendent. And as you already pointed out, the fire which burned the town started on federal land, managed by the federal government. And by the time it got to the town, there wasn't a damn thing they could have done because of the intensity of the fire. Emile, where would you put the responsibility for this? I fully agree with what Ken is saying. Based on everything that we've looked at, based on the agreements that are in place, Parks Canada is managed by the federal government. (1:24:09 - 1:26:27) It is federal land. It has totally different management goals and objectives. DND, Department of National Defense is another example of federal land in B.C. And we had no impact provincially on what was happening on federal lands. Alberta has no real impact except words on what's happening in federal lands. Alberta did map the pine beetle all around Jasper. Jasper's maps to find out what the pine beetle situation is. And the data, it's not available. So why are they hiding it? So the responsibility solely, fully, and completely, federal government, Parks Canada, their policies, they don't have the knowledge or the background required to manage the forests. They're doing pretty good with people management except for forests. So yeah, no, I agree with Ken of squarely, fully federal government. And I'm not going to name all of the people that were involved because it's a long history, but it's squarely on the federal government. And they should be supporting, not just with words and nice photo ops, the people who live in Jasper, but they can't do it quite as well because there's another agreement in Jasper. You will own nothing and you will be happy. Jasper people lease their land. They own their houses, I understand. So what's going to happen in the rebuild in Jasper? And I've heard that there were at least 40 plans in how to manage the recovery in Jasper, including changes to zoning from single family to higher density, road improvements. And the good part is, is the lead water pipes that fed that part of Jasper, and they're mapped. Maybe they'll get replaced. Instead of lead plumbing, they'll get safer plumbing. No, it's again, it's fully on the feds preventing what can occur in Jasper. It's yeah, square on the federal government. (1:26:29 - 1:28:54) Gentlemen, I want to ask you for your final thoughts for our viewers. This is a very open ended question. You can say whatever you like. Just as a bit of a framework, you've both made reference to the fact that we seem to be learning nothing, that the situation that happened in Jasper could easily happen again in another eight or 10 years. It certainly happened in other places in this country. As forest management experts, having looked at this problem with your 90 years of combined experience, any final thoughts for our viewers? Well, there's a few that come to mind, which we really haven't discussed. What did they learn from other fires that existed that had beetle stands around their community and the community was burnt as well? Fort Mac, just a few years ago, Lillooet, the park down in Waterton, all of those had beetles in them. They all had conditions that were extreme. Did they look and see what happened there? How were they prepared? How were they not prepared? You just have to look in the past and learn from that and prevent what occurred in Jasper these days. The other point I wanted to make is that the four parks of Jasper, Banff, Yoho, and Kootenai consists of over 2 million hectares of land. If you take about 35% of that being forested land, that's 700,000 hectares and they don't have one forester who is there employed by the government. So, how do you manage the land base when you don't have qualified people to do it? A lot of this could be prevented by good forest management. It doesn't mean you have to log, but look at how you can manage that forest and like Emil says, you work with it. You don't work against it because it's going to win every time. Emil? Yeah, what Ken is, he's got to pull together a lot of good information. The other thing that when professional foresters provide advice, we're personally, individually responsible for information that we offer. That information can be completely ignored by anybody in the management level and they aren't liable, they're not responsible. The legislation is, it protects them. (1:28:55 - 1:32:30) If you're not going to be responsible for the decisions you make or the ones that you don't make and you ignore, you're not going to learn anything. 1981 was the first time I met Parks Canada planners when I worked in a ministry provincial office. Parks Canada, their planners told us the Pine Beetle needs to be stopped in BC. It doesn't exist in Kootenay National Park, doesn't exist in Alberta. Either you manage it or we will and we'll send bills a little to you guys and you can pay for it politically. Parks Canada hasn't learned anything since 1981 and I was just a young guy listening and learning at the time. I've picked up a little more knowledge since 1981 and nothing has changed in what the federal government or Parks Canada is doing. They're not managing forests, they're moving people around and making nice campsites that are expensive, 52 bucks for a night, give me a break. What are they doing with that money? They're not putting it back and they're not getting people involved that have some knowledge, some background in hiring a university student with three years education because they're suitable for that position. They're not suitable for that position. You got to learn it. It's just taken us 40, 50 years to gain the knowledge that we have. You don't apply that straight out of university or three, four, five, ten years. You got to include people who have some of that experience Parks hasn't changed. When Banffs and Canmore burn up later, it's because Parks Canada has still got their hand ties from UNESCO or other federal limitations and we're going to be here 10 years later maybe, a little bit more gray, saying we told you so. I don't want to do that. I want to see that improvements occur because we have the tools, the knowledge and the expertise. There's some really good people still out there working. If Parks and the federal government chooses to ignore that, what are you going to do? Vote in somebody new who will change their mind? Nothing has changed. Gentlemen, thank you. Can I add one more thing? The other can. Go ahead. Yeah, and here's some thoughts for you for another program with people who are experts. The federal government has really pushed climate change. That's the emissions of carbon and carbon dioxide into the air. How much did this fire emit into the atmosphere when they could have prevented it? Just some food for thought for you. Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time today, for your expertise and for most of all, being willing to come forward and tell people what you know. Tell them the truth. Yep. Thank you so very much for having us, Will. It's very much appreciated. Yeah, very much, Will. Really appreciate that. And you've asked questions that we don't have to tiptoe around and that's what we need to do. We need to open that discussion and hold those who are accountable to account. And more, we need to improve on what we did in the past. It's up to us.