gunter: parks canada’s wokeism doomed jasper
bureaucracy and environmental wokeism did in jasper. wa...
jul 27 2024
3 minute read
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bureaucracy and environmental wokeism did in jasper.
wait for it. there will be an onslaught of accusations that climate change is behind the devastation that occurred in the lovely mountain resort in alberta.
environmentalists, academics and the current liberal government have blamed the fort mcmurray fire in 2016, the lytton fire in 2021 and last summer’s quebec fires on climate change. why not blame it for jasper 2024, too?
blaming climate change will be used to bolster increasingly unpopular climate-change measures such as ev mandates, net-zero power grid expenditures and the carbon tax.
don’t believe if for a minute.
parks canada’s insistence that thousands of hectares of dead forest be allowed to regenerate naturally turned jasper national park into kindling.
bill byrne, a former alberta deputy minister, frequently butted heads with federal officials over their refusal to thin out dead forests in the national parks. he wrote in the edmonton journal on friday that parks canada’s rigidity ensured “the parks were becoming tinder boxes which would not only destroy the federal parks but, once started and out of control, would spread into adjacent alberta forests.”
according to byrne, a highly decorated archaeologist, the provincial warnings to parks canada go back at least 25 years when the mountain pine beetle began killing trees in jasper, banff and waterton national parks.
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the alberta government permits selective logging of dead trees from provincial forests. it allows limited firebreaks in advance, conducts prescribed burns and allows “natural fires to run their course if lives or private property were not at risk,” byrne explained.
that’s far from the eco-extremist approach by parks canada. for instance, no selective logging was permitted inside the parks to thin out the hundreds of thousands of trees lost to beetles. instead, they stood bare of needles and red for up to two decades, getting drier by the year like giant matchsticks.
when wildfire finally came, kilometre after kilometre of the beautiful national park turned into a tsunami of flame that surged over a large part of jasper townsite in a matter of hours.
but the concerns weren’t just from alberta.
as long ago as 2016, parks canada’s own chief conservation officer suggested it might be wise to engage in a little “active management,” i.e. selective logging. nothing was done.
in 2017, the town’s popular, longtime mayor, richard ireland, pleaded with parks canada that all the deadwood had become a “major fire hazard.” he worried even then that the “increased fuel load” could, if ignited, make jasper “the next fort mcmurray.”
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the “green” cultists in charge at parks canada wouldn’t hear it. it was around this time the federal agency decided to step up its efforts to convince campers and sightseers to take better care extinguishing their fires and putting out their cigarettes.
in 2018, the house of commons natural resources committee recommended immediate and significant intervention at jasper. and two longtime professional foresters, emile begin and ken hodges, did a thorough examination of the problem and predicted a “mega fire” was inevitable unless an active intervention occurred. “houses and livelihoods are at a very high risk of being destroyed.”
their predictions have come true, unfortunately.
with a fire of this magnitude, expect a federal investigation. but don’t expect parks canada to be handed the blame.
blaming climate change not only fits into the current elite narrative about every extreme weather or nature event. it’s also an easier explanation.
politicians, reporters, academics, activists and many in the public are already conditioned to believe climate change is the cause of everything bad. break out the evs, heat pumps, wind turbines and fossil fuel bans.
blaming climate change also means no one at parks canada has to take responsibility.
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it’s all so convenient.
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