Earlier this month, the Alberta Union of Public Employees (AUPE), raised concerns over the government’s 2024 budget regarding its preparation for the season ahead—mainly on their failure to address recruitment and retention within Alberta Wildfire.
Last year, Alberta saw an unprecedented wildfire season, burning a record-breaking 2.2 million hectares of land—this number was ten times more than average. This year, Alberta’s wildfire season started on February 20, ten days earlier.
“The wildfires of 2023 completely were unprecedented—we are now looking at drought and rising temperatures and literally we’re just staring down the barrel of another catastrophe,” said James Gault, vice-president of AUPE.
“If the government doesn’t want to do anything for it, then they’re going to be responsible for any lives that are lost or any property that is lost because they clearly knew that this was coming,” Gault added.
According to the Government of Alberta’s 2024 budget, there are $151 million in operating expenses, $55 million in capital funding for new wildfire fighting equipment and facilities, $19 million to develop a new water strategy plan, and $10 million for a three-year capital fund to expand air and water monitoring to respond to extreme weather events including wildfires.
“We’ve added more money into it. Of course, adding more money isn’t important as what you do with the money,” said Minister of Forestry and Parks Todd Loewen.
To date they added 104 Type 1 firefighters on the ground and have extended contracts for firefighting crews from 93 days to 123 days according to Minister Loewen. They will also be hiring more people with the budget increase. However, most of these new hires are seasonal with little to no experience.
“Just like every other jurisdiction in the world, we hire seasonal firefighters when fires are the most prevalent—and that’s what you need. There are probably some people that think we should hire people year-round and not have anything for them to do the winter,” said Minister Loewen.
Minister Loewen added that Alberta Wildfire currently has full-time firefighters throughout the winter fighting fires. But with 55 wildfires currently active in Alberta, 50 of which are carryover wildfires from last year, dry conditions and low precipitation, Gault warned that this year could be worse than the last—and keeping experienced firefighters in Alberta is important.
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“What’s been happening is we don’t keep them after the end of a season. That means we’re retraining. For this year, we have people with two years of experience leading crews of 20 people into what could be some of the worst fires that we’ve ever seen in our province or anywhere in Canada,” said Gault.
No incentive to stay, Alberta’s failure in retaining experienced firefighters
Chris Yeremiy spent nearly 10 years as an Alberta Wildland firefighter. During his time, Yeremiy worked with the Rapattack program where firefighting crews would stop smaller forest fires before they evolved into bigger wildfires.
Despite support for the Rapattack program from wildland firefighters and municipalities including Fox Creek, Nordic and Crows Nest Pass, the program was discontinued in 2019—according to Minister Loewen, the Rapattack program was too expensive adding that it was more dangerous than other firefighting tasks.
But along with the program, Yeremiy said that years of experienced firefighters and crew leaders disappeared as well.
“If you destroy an entire program that’s been around for 30 to 35 years and then that experience goes out the door. You have a huge brain drain and you’ve lost a lot of experience that teaches all these younger guys. You’re basically starting over in Alberta,” said Yeremiy.
As the wildfire season begins, Alberta Wildfire hires seasonal or contract firefighters and Yeremiy said there’s no effort to retain experienced firefighters.
“The thinking of Alberta Wildfire is that these seasonal employees are sort of expendable. If they don’t come back next year, ‘well, we’ll just recruit more students or we’ll get them replaced—we just need manpower,’” said Yeremiy.
Brendan Hajdu, former Alberta wildland firefighter, highlighted that the lack of investment in compensation and viability as a long-term career, contributed to Alberta Wildfire’s recruitment and retention issues.
“The retention issue is huge. And I think part of it is there’s not much opportunity or incentive to stay. There are no benefits, there’s no off-season benefits. They don’t guarantee you a position coming back the following season—no matter how long you’ve been there,” said Hadju.
Hajdu echoed Yeremiy’s experiences.
“It’s not only you’re losing a person—and yeah, sure the position gets filled, but you’re losing the experience. You’re losing kind of like the street smarts of the fire world when you lose these people with four, five or six years of experience, right?” said Hajdu.
For the wildland firefighters that do return, this adds another layer of stress to the job.
“Our members are nervous. They’re scared. But it’s just one of those things that you have to do—you have to protect Albertans. Inexperienced firefighters leading crews is just going to spread out to the community at some point. That’s where mistakes are going to be made,” said Gault.
“And it’s not the fault of the people who are fighting the fires. It’s the fault of the government for not retaining people and letting them learn and work together as a group for years on end,” he added.
According to Gault and Yeremiy, wildland firefighters end up moving onto other opportunities with better compensation—sometimes only after serving two seasons. Hajdu, for instance, left Alberta Wildfire and took a position with Parks Canada.
“There is no incentive to stay here. This is a stepping stone and Alberta ends up paying the price at the end,” said Gault.
Alberta budget 2024 does nothing to address retention issues
As Alberta’s pool of experienced firefighters continues to be drained, Gault and Yeremiy have criticized the government’s 2024 budget. Although the wildland firefighting budget has increased to $150 million, Gault said that it is not going towards supporting wildland firefighters. Rather, it’s being allocated towards new equipment.
“The province has talked about technology in wildfire suppression—in the end technology does not put out fires. It is good judgement, hard work and good resource allocation that helps control and extinguish fires,” said Yeremiy.
The contingency fund was also raised to $2 billion which is still $900 million short of what was spent last year for drought and wildfire expenses.
“They have these contingency funds for being reactive to situations. This is my frustration. They’re trying to save money on the front-end of the budget,” said Yeremiy.
In 2023, the province was set ablaze and became too much for just Alberta Wildfire. Dipping into the contingency fund, firefighters were called from across Canada as well as on an international level.
“Then it’s a crazy amount of spending on hoarding resources from other provinces or the US, and then we had to bring in firefighters from other places from around the world—and that’s a huge cost,” said Yeremiy. “So that’s money that’s sort of going out the door in a reactive motion.”
Rather than rely on the contingency fund for when wildfires become out of control, Yeremiy said that investing in proactive measures is crucial. For instance, training firefighters who can put out or keep smaller fires under control.
“We should be promoting our own people, getting them to stay in our jurisdiction, and training them as best as possible to make the best possible decisions—that will save us money in the long run,” said Yeremiy.
We’re way better off being proactive in keeping our best firefighters and training them to make the best decisions possible. And that’s not what we’re having right now in Alberta.
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