It does kind of highlight how much the East Coast dismisses the West Coast. This is considered a novel, otherworldly experience, but it is yearly at this point for us and anything about future prevention is just hand-waved away. Maybe now it won't be.
Like what?
Forest fires/wildfires have become increasingly
political over the years. Politicians in Alberta actually made it political trading potshots with the other parties, because when the fires started this year, it was in the weeks just before we expected the writ to be dropped for the provincial election we just had.
When former UCP premier Jason Kenney took over in 2019, one of the things he cut funding to was a highly-trained, specialized crew of firefighters, whose function was to rappel down into trouble spots from helicopters - because either the area was too densely forested to allow a helicopter to land, or not level enough to allow a helicopter to land. This meant that firefighters could get to trouble spots much faster, and help prevent these more dense/remote fires from getting worse.
This makes sense, so of course the UCP cut the funding. This is an anti-science, climate change-denying party that doesn't do common sense. They do ideology. If they just say something isn't happening, they expect everyone to believe it. And for some reason, many of the very people who are being screwed over by their policies keep voting for them.
During the campaign, it was absolutely sickening how they pointed fingers at the NDP (the government we had from 2015-2019), blaming former premier Rachel Notley for the Fort McMurray fire. The fact is, Fort Mac was evacuated with only 2 deaths (the media keeps saying nobody died, but that isn't true; a teenage couple died due to a collision with another vehicle that was also evacuating). For a fire like that, it's surprising that there were so few human deaths (it's heartbreaking about the animals, of course).
Anyway, the way the UCP's line goes, Rachel Notley (NDP leader) does whatever her "boss" Jagmeet Singh says (he's the federal NDP leader), and the two of them are in a "new party" with Justin Trudeau (federal Liberal leader and our current Prime Minister)... never mind that this isn't how it really works.
Federal parties and provincial parties are separate. There is no "new party" between the NDP and Liberals. There is an agreement whereby Singh's NDP MPs will support Trudeau's Liberals on some votes, as long as the Liberals hold up their end of the agreement by tabling certain bills and supporting some of the bills the NDP also support. That's how an unofficial coalition works, and in this system of government, it happens all the time when the governing party either has a minority government or a slim majority. It's especially important when money bills such as the budget comes up - if a budget bill is defeated, the government automatically falls on a vote of non-confidence, and a new election is triggered.
So in the midst of these fires, the politicians are playing blame games. Anyone named Trudeau is so hated in this part of the country that nobody would bat an eye if I were to stub my toe and blame Justin Trudeau for it.
The federal Liberals are trying to convince the provincial UCP that transitioning to more 'green' technologies and retraining rig workers and drivers really isn't a bad thing. With automated trucks being used at the tarsands now, it's not like a lot of people will have jobs there anyway, as time goes on and more things are automated.
I was wondering what the East Coast is being dismissive of.
They complain that the sky isn't blue and the air smells smoky. Well, of course it does, when wildfire smoke reaches that area. But there tends to be a lack of a sincere attempt to understand why this happens, and how it affects the people in the thick of it.
I sincerely do not understand how
@Synobun has been able to tolerate living in southern BC this past decade, with how bad the fires and heat issues get some years. I nearly ended up in the hospital two summers ago from the heat dome (the fan I ordered from Amazon arrived the same morning I woke up with symptoms of heat exhaustion; we only have air conditioning in one room in this building), and it wasn't quite as bad here as it was in BC.
Mind you, 40C here means at ground level. I live the equivalent of 5 floors up, in a suite with an eastern exposure (I get the morning/midday sun), on a sunny hillside, and no air conditioning. It was more than 40C up here, and I spent weeks of running on very little sleep, there were days when it was too hot to even
think, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to do the July NaNoWriMo because it was too hot to think or move around much (I did get through it thanks to the fan), I had to figure out where the coolest place would be to keep my insulin (once you begin using an insulin pen it does
not go back into the fridge), and I was monitoring Maddy every hour or two, to make sure she wasn't having breathing problems (heat exhaustion/heat stroke affects pets as well).
And that was here, hundreds of miles from where the worst of the heat dome was. Hundreds of people and animals died from a variety of causes related to this event. You'd think the politicians would learn. They actually had to have it explained to them that they can't just wave a hand and tell people to "go to a cooling station" if they don't have air conditioning at home. Cooling stations don't grow on trees. Many people don't have access to them. And this was during the pandemic when some places still insisted on social distancing at a time when all people needed was access to cold water to keep themselves hydrated and their bodies cool.
