Un été de fumée : la résilience communautaire après la saison des feux de 2023

For many Canadians, the summer of 2023 is remembered through the colour of the sky. Smoke drifted across cities far from any flame, and the familiar rhythms of summer were interrupted by air-quality warnings and evacuation orders.

The scale was unprecedented. According to Natural Resources Canada, more than 15 million hectares burned by the end of the year — more than twice the previous record set in 1989 — across more than 6,000 fires. On a single day in early June, more than 120 fires ignited in Quebec alone. The season touched nearly every region, from the West Coast to Atlantic Canada and the North.

When emergencies become seasonal

What was once exceptional is increasingly recurrent. For community organisations, this changes the nature of preparedness. It is no longer adequate to regard emergencies as rare disruptions to normal operations. They are becoming, in some regions, part of the operating environment itself.

That realisation carries practical consequences. Seniors’ programmes must consider how vulnerable participants will be reached during an evacuation. Food programmes must anticipate surges in demand. Every organisation must ask how it will communicate with staff, volunteers and clients if its office is closed, its power is out or its community is displaced.

The quiet infrastructure of resilience

Resilience is built less in the emergency than in the months before it:

• Emergency contact procedures that work without the office.
• Cloud-based records and backups, so that information survives the loss of a building.
• Mutual-aid agreements with neighbouring organisations.
• Volunteer rosters of people trained and willing to help in crises.
• Attention to mental health, for staff and communities living through repeated disruption.

Hope, soberly held

It would be easy to meet such figures with despair. I prefer a sober hope. The same summer that revealed our vulnerability also revealed extraordinary solidarity: communities sheltering evacuees, volunteers staffing reception centres, neighbours checking on neighbours. Our task is to give that solidarity the structure it needs to be ready next time.