The photo-op is always the same. Row after row of Canadian Armed Forces members stepping off a Hercules transport plane, clad in olive drab, ready to "save" northern Ontario from the latest raging wildfire. The politicians stand at the microphones, offering solemn thanks to our brave men and women in uniform. The public sighs with relief. The media runs the front-page spread.
It is a comforting narrative. It is also an absolute policy disaster. Don't miss our recent coverage on this related article.
Calling in the military to fight wildland fires is not a sign of a functioning emergency response system. It is a loud, flashing red admission of systemic failure. When the Doug Ford government begs the federal government for military assistance, they are not demonstrating decisive leadership. They are trying to cover up the fact that they have systematically gutted Ontario’s frontline defenses, leaving the province physically and logistically bankrupt when the inevitable dry season hits.
We need to stop celebrating these deployments. We need to start viewing them for what they actually are: an incredibly expensive, highly dangerous, and operationally ineffective band-aid. If you want more about the history here, The Guardian provides an informative summary.
The Infantry is Not a Fire Department
Let us dismantle the primary myth of the military deployment: the idea that a soldier is a universal tool who can be dropped into any crisis and magically solve it.
Wildland firefighting is not manual labor. It is a highly technical, dangerous discipline requiring years of specialized training. To think you can take an infantry battalion, give them a two-day crash course on how to swing a Pulaski axe, and drop them onto an active, unpredictable fire line is wild.
I have spent years analyzing emergency response pipelines. Here is the reality of what happens when you put untrained troops on a fire line:
- The Babysitting Tax: Because soldiers do not have the wildland training to read fire behavior, weather patterns, or fuel structures, they cannot operate independently. For every squad of soldiers deployed, you must pull seasoned, highly trained Type 1 forest firefighters off the active fire line to supervise them. You are literally reducing your expert capacity to babysit amateurs.
- The Equipment Mismatch: The military is built to fight wars, not flames. Their personal protective equipment is designed for combat, not sustained, high-heat wildland environments. Heavy combat boots and synthetic-blend uniforms are a recipe for heat exhaustion and melt-to-skin injuries in a forest fire.
- The Physical Reality: While soldiers are physically fit, the specific physical demands of wildland firefighting are brutal in a completely different way. Dragging thousands of feet of wet, high-pressure hose up a 40-degree rocky incline in choking smoke is a highly specialized endurance task.
When we treat the military as a reserve pool of free labor, we risk lives. A soldier who does not know how to spot a "widowmaker" (a dead tree branch ready to fall and crush them) or recognize when a fire is about to draft up a chimney ridge is a liability, not an asset.
The Economic Scam of the Military Cop-Out
Why does the provincial government love calling in the military if they are so ill-suited for the job? Because of a cynical accounting trick.
Under the current federal framework, when a province requests assistance through the Request for Federal Assistance (RFA) process, the federal government absorbs a massive portion of the operational cost of deploying the military. For a provincial treasury looking to balance its books, using federal troops is a way to shift the financial burden of forest management onto the federal taxpayer.
Meanwhile, look at what has happened to Ontario’s own domestic firefighting capacity.
For years, wildland firefighters in Ontario have been warning about a retention crisis. These are seasonal workers who are paid insultingly low wages, given minimal benefits, and offered zero job security once the snow starts falling. They are expected to risk their lives for a wage that barely competes with a retail job in a major city, all while dealing with chronic exposure to toxic smoke and high rates of physical trauma.
The result? Experienced crew leaders are leaving the profession in droves. Ontario’s Aviation, Forest Fire and Emergency Services (AFFES) branch is constantly understaffed, missing the critical mid-level expertise needed to run complex fire campaigns.
Instead of fixing the retention crisis—instead of paying these specialists a professional, year-round salary with proper mental health and physical support—the provincial government lets the domestic program rot, knowing they can just call Ottawa for a military bailout when the province starts burning. It is the ultimate moral hazard.
Dismantling the Public Myths
Let us address the questions that constantly crop up in public discourse, questions that are fundamentally flawed because they accept the wrong premises.
"Why can’t the military just adapt and become permanent firefighters?"
This is a common refrain. People ask why we do not simply train a division of the military to do this job year-round.
The answer is simple: it ruins the military’s primary mandate. The Canadian Armed Forces are already critically understaffed, facing their own massive recruitment crisis, and struggling to meet international defense commitments. Expecting our infantry, engineers, and logistical units to spend every summer fighting domestic fires means they are not training for their actual job: national defense and combat readiness.
Using the military as a catch-all national cleanup crew degrades our national security posture. It is a lazy shortcut that avoids building robust provincial institutions.
"Isn’t any help better than no help when a community is threatened?"
No. This is a dangerous emotional argument.
In a complex wildfire scenario, bad help is worse than no help because it consumes precious resources. A military deployment requires an enormous logistical footprint. You have to feed them, house them, transport them, and establish communication nets for them.
In remote northern Ontario communities, where runway space is limited and supply chains are already stretched to the limit, importing hundreds of military personnel who cannot actively lead fire attacks creates a logistical bottleneck. Those resources—the aviation fuel, the camp space, the food—would be far more effectively used by flying in certified Type 1 or Type 2 wildland crews from other provinces or international partners who actually know how to run a pump line.
The Real Blueprint for Fire Management
If we want to stop relying on military theater, we have to change how we view forest fires. We must move away from the emergency mindset and move toward an ongoing management mindset.
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Here is the path forward, and it is highly uncomfortable for politicians who rely on quick photo-ops:
1. Professionalize the Wildland Workforce
Stop treating wildland firefighters like seasonal summer help. They are tactical environmental specialists. They deserve:
- Year-round contracts with off-season focus on fuels management and mitigation.
- Comprehensive healthcare that covers presumptive cancers and respiratory diseases caused by smoke inhalation.
- A base salary that reflects the extreme hazard of the job.
2. Embrace Controlled burning
Our obsession with putting out every single fire has created a massive fuel-loading problem. For a century, we have suppressed natural fire cycles, leaving Ontario’s boreal forest packed with dead, dry wood just waiting for a spark.
We must significantly increase the use of prescribed, controlled burns to clear out this underbrush. This means accepting that there will be smoke in the air during the spring, and it means accepting the small risk that a controlled burn might occasionally escape. That is a politically difficult pill to swallow, but the alternative is uncontrolled, catastrophic summer crown fires that burn entire towns to the ground.
3. De-centrally Empower First Nations Communities
The communities most affected by these fires are remote First Nations in northern Ontario. They are also the communities with the deepest historical knowledge of the land and how fire behaves on it.
Instead of flying in southern soldiers who have never stepped foot in the boreal forest, we should be investing directly in northern Indigenous communities. We need to fund, train, and equip permanent, localized firefighting crews in every single northern community. They do not need to wait for a federal deployment order; they are already there, they know the terrain, and they have a vested interest in protecting their homes.
The Real Cost of Inaction
Yes, implementing these changes is expensive. Yes, it requires a long-term vision that doesn't fit neatly into a four-year election cycle. It means provincial budgets will have to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to forest management even during wet years when nothing burns.
But the current model is a fiscal illusion. We are paying for it anyway. We pay for it through the federal defense budget, we pay for it in the astronomical costs of emergency evacuations, we pay for it in lost economic productivity, and we pay for it in the destruction of our natural resources.
The next time you see a headline about the military being deployed to fight fires in Ontario, do not cheer. Do not praise the government for taking swift action.
Recognize it for what it is: a systemic failure of governance, a waste of military readiness, and a clear sign that our leaders would rather rely on emergency drama than do the hard, quiet work of keeping our forests safe.
