Orange hues dominated the sky and ash rained down on Toronto for the second day in a row, as wildfires continued to spread and rage in northern Ontario.
Premier Doug Ford has insisted that his government put its full financial weight behind firefighting efforts, but critics claim the province has lagged in its funding and preparedness for fires that have only gotten worse with climate change.
Experts and independent government agency reports point to a much more complicated picture. Larger fires have grown more frequent and damaging than ever before, meaning governments may need to think beyond firefighting on how to manage them.
“Human beings think that we can outsmart Mother Nature, but some of these fires are incredibly intense, like the ones we’re seeing in northern Ontario right now,” said Glenn McGillivray, a professor of disaster and emergency management at York University.
As of Thursday afternoon, 177 active fires were burning, fuelled by a stretch of hot, dry weather and high winds. A few wildfires in northwestern Ontario have also forced evacuations, including one that destroyed homes and buildings on Namaygoosisagagun First Nation north of Thunder Bay, where residents fled the flames without government help.
Many of the fires were sparked by lightning. Others have been attributed to human activity, which can include unattended bonfires or power lines.
The union representing wildland firefighters, pilots and operational staff was among those blaming Ford Thursday for understaffing and underfunding firefighting crews.
“The fact is that Ontario’s fire seasons have changed, but our staffing hasn’t kept pace,” said Jeremy Rouse, the OPSEU chair representing Ministry of Natural Resources employees.
“We cannot continue to respond to increasingly severe fire seasons with fewer resources than the situation demands,” Rouse said.
In Toronto, air quality has only gotten worse, as smoke from the fires up north billows southward. Soot caked the city Thursday morning, with the Air Quality Health Index peaking at a reading of 30 during the morning rush, more than double yesterday’s peak on a scale of 0 to 10+.
Over the past three days, the provincial government has been working closely with northern Ontario communities, said Nastassia Varela, a spokesperson for Emergency Preparedness Minister Jill Dunlop.
“This morning, we have also requested the federal government be ready to deploy the Canadian Armed Forces as we work through a fast-moving and evolving situation … our government’s top priority is to keep people safe,” Varela said.
Is the Ford government doing enough?
Ford defended his government’s firefighting budget, blasting people “on social media” who have accused him of cutting it.
“We would never underfund our firefighters ever — never ever. We’ve more than doubled the base funding for emergency firefighting,” Ford said at a groundbreaking for a hospital in Windsor on Thursday,
In his eight years in office, Ford has upped funding for emergency firefighting, budget documents show. But, as was practice before Ford entered office, that budget is routinely less than what’s actually needed to actually put wildfires out, and at the end of the year, the actual amount spent is far higher. That’s been the case every year for the past decade, except 2022.
The province spent $271 million battling wildfires last year — but the province had budgeted just $135 million. For this year, the province has budgeted $150 million for emergency firefighting.
Fire rangers have previously criticized this method of emergency planning, and told the Star last year that it can often lead to last-minute scrambles for helicopters and planes that could have been leased in advance.
On Thursday, Ford noted his government had earmarked $650 million for five new helicopters and six water bombers.
A spokesperson for Natural Resources Minister Mike Harris said the province has added “nearly 170 permanent fire personnel since 2024” and has an existing fleet of “over 50 aircraft, including helicopters and waterbombers.”
Wildfires grow larger, more devastating
Over the past decade, wildfires in Canada have gotten worse.
Data from the Canadian National Fire Database shows there are fewer total fires in Canada, but wildfires are now burning larger than before. According to the Ministry of Natural Resources, Ontario saw 643 wildland fires in 2025, lower than the 10-year average, but saw 597,654 hectares of land burned, an area larger than Prince Edward Island.
The growing problem is mostly, but not entirely, fuelled by climate change, said Mike Flannigan, a B.C. research chair at Thompson Rivers University who specializes in fire science.
Fire is natural in the forests that cover most of Ontario, but decades of fire suppression have left many cluttered with fuel that’s ready to ignite. Climate change, meanwhile, brings longer, hotter fire seasons. Those warmer temperatures fuel more lightning, which can ignite new fires and suck the moisture out of forests so they burn easily and quickly.
“This is a new reality, ” Flannigan said. “There is going to be more fire and smoke in the future.”
Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources prioritizes fires based on how likely they are to harm people or critical infrastructure, which Flannigan said is “one of the best ways to approach it.” Sometimes, if a fire poses a low risk, it’s best to let it burn, he added.
“I think the public has this expectation that we can put out all the fires all the time,” he said. “I don’t think that’s true, and nor should we. To be honest, we should be letting some of those fires play their natural role.”
Too little, too late
For fires that do pose a risk to communities, extra funding can help efforts to extinguish them. But those resources need to be in place early to tackle new fires while they’re still small, Flannigan said.
“Even when things are extreme, you have a window,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a short window, like 30 minutes. If you get resources to the fire within that 30 minutes, you generally can put it out.”
At a certain point, however, uncontrolled fires can become too big for crews to control, no matter how much funding is available, said McGillivray, also the managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction.
The 2024 Jasper fire, for example, was so hot it created its own weather system, with turbulence that made it even more difficult for air tanker crews to battle the flames.
“The turbulence was so bad that their heads were hitting the sides of the cockpit,” McGillivray said. “Then when they dropped their load, it was blowing horizontally back into the fire and evaporating.”
Instead, governments could better protect communities by making them less flammable, McGillivray said. Simple measures like creating firebreaks and using fire-resistant building materials can make a huge difference.
“This is not a huge mystery,” he said. “We know exactly what to do. We just really don’t do it.”
Flannigan said in general, governments need to be more proactive. Experts can predict the weather conditions that lead to new fires, he said, meaning governments could create an early warning system and move resources to high-risk areas before anything ignites.
“We should ask the question as Canadians: Is the status quo the best option?” Flannigan asked.
With files from Marco Chown Oved and Robert Benzie
