I just got back from a 3 week driving/camping trip in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI. Saw one big plume of smoke from a forest fire in New Brunswick, and the skies were tinged red with smoke in NB, Quebec, and Ontario. The forests are extremely dry. My friend's well is going dry and ground water is low. Two days ago in NB, standing outside in a breeze, it felt like a hairdryer blowing, hot and dry. If the peat lands start burning, that will burn underground and they can't stop it.
To me, having just been there, and witnessing some asshole behaviour from some of the campers, it makes total sense to close down the parks. There are not enough resources to deal with more fires there. Keep in mind these are not heavily populated provinces, so there are less resources to deal with out of control fires.
35°c, in the shade here, almost precisly on the 45'th parallel, the ground in baked hard, evrything is starting to wilt a bit, peole are getting water trucked in to there dug wells, just checked weather across the country and we seem to be about the hottest, will last a few more days, my fridge quit first thing this morning, my horse has never sought shade till today, almost no mosquitos, temp tonight will be in the mid teens, and then back up again, only good thing, is that there is no wind.........normal NS weather/climate is much much cooler and damp....to the point that mycologists come here to do field work, the only place with more mushrooms bieng somwhere in siberia
Title edited for length and clarity from the original: N.S. bans hiking and use of vehicles in woods as dry conditions raise wildfire fears
For context, the government of Canada provides https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/interactive-map to track wildfires. At time of submission, Nova Scotia is currently reporting a single wildfire — under control, at an area of 1.3 hectares. It seems there were a couple more when the story was posted. Even other Maritime provinces are currently dealing with much worse, to say nothing of the northern Prairies.
There are several hundred other wildfires currently burning across the country which has burned nearly 18 million acres this year, making it the second worst season in recorded history.. when your fire assets are all in other provinces, it makes sense to be cautious “at home”.
> Nova Scotia is currently reporting a single wildfire — under control, at an area of 1.3 hectares. It seems there were a couple more when the story was posted. Even other Maritime provinces are currently dealing with much worse, to say nothing of the northern Prairies.
Seems like Nova Scotia's fire prevention tactics (like this) are working! The time to keep people out of the woods to prevent a fire is before there is a fire.
The comparison is unreasonable; Nova Scotia is 21,345 mi² by area, of which 75% forest, with a population of only 1.08m.
And Nova Scotia's ban is only temporary, for 12 weeks, which is wildfire season. And this year (to Aug 12) is already Canada's second-worst wildfire season on record:
>7.3 million hectares have burned [nationwide] this year so far, more than double the 10-year average for this time of year
"It's the size of New Brunswick, to put it into context," Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University, told CBC News.
The last three fire seasons are among the 10 worst on record, according to a federal database dating back to 1972, with 2023's devastating blazes taking the top spot.
"I've never seen three bad fire seasons in a row," Flannigan, who has been studying fires since the '70s, said.
Wildfires start often without warning, and can spread very quickly, especially in hot, dry, windy conditions. We can never predict where a fire will start, as it could be one of many causes. Firefighting is always reactive in this regard.
This move is purely to protect people from being seriously injured, or (horrifically) burnt alive, by unexpectedly ignited fast-moving wildfires. Fire trucks and firefighters are not an unlimited resource, they can be overstretched in long campaign events with further unexpected ignitions.
As others have alluded to Australia is often accused of government overreach, but I can say that these decisions are not taken lightly as we don't want to be alarmist or restrict people's freedoms, but we also need to balance the very real threat to public safety that wildfire poses, and causes, and the available resources we have to manage new ignitions should they break out.
The language the news article uses is, in my view, misleading. "Ban" implies non-negotiable permanence and is often associated with a permanent restriction of personal freedoms, though the article, which lets face it most people don't read beyond headlines these days, is more akin to the temporary 'closure' to parts of public areas in forests and national parks, the same orders often issued by Australian fire authorities, to protect people from areas and conditions that are potentially (or are actually) dangerous to be in during elevated fire danger periods.
"Ban" sounds a lot worse than "Closure", though I also recognise this may be a legislative quirk, or confusion of terms: we have "Total Fire Ban" (government area wide, or statewide), "Park Fire Ban" and "Solid Fuel Fire Bans" (specific to individual parks, and forests respectively) that are both temporary but must be called 'bans', as those are the specific legislative tools given to us to manage ignitions.
Source: am a firefighter who has had to deal with these issues, during some very significant and internationally notable fire emergencies.
As a local to the area, a lot of the pushback is coming from the fact that this is not a closure of public parkland, but a restriction from entering any wooded area in the province - public or private.
Is the 'private' part being aggressively enforced? How many arrests (on private land)? I can't find any reports of any. Presumably Nova Scotians are voluntarily complying with the temporary ban.
Is the state that routinely sets records for destructive fires - in terms of dollars and people burned to death - the one that Canada should use an example? Should we take inspiration from the country that just accidentally burned down the Grand Canyon Lodge by treating a wildfire like a controlled burn?
As someone who lives in a fire zone in Canada, I can understand why this might feel like over-reach. I can also understand that when our emergency response services are stretched thin, you might make temporary civil rights restrictions to avoid a larger tragedy.
Can you enlighten me how Canada should better manage what is the largest, or second largest, forested area in any country’s territory, in areas that are so remote as to be measured in days and 100s of KMs of travel to access. There is nowhere in the lower 48 that compares to the majority of Canadian forest lands.
Have you been to Canada’s forests? There are areas that aren’t even accessible by air attack firefighters, let alone road. The fact that most of our fires are natural compared to the majority being human caused in the US is reason enough to treat fire mitigation entirely differently, and not to use the same strategies as the US.
If people (Americans especially! I’m making an assumption based on your rhetoric, and the similarity to American right wing talking points) could stop with trying to tell Canada nonsensical things about the forests, many of us would appreciate it.
Most states of Australia (which, yes, is the anglosphere capital of government overreach) ban most hiking on government land on days that are rated catastrophic fire danger.
Also, to be fair, most people here on HN will probably go with their own habits: They'd be great stewards of nature. They don't smoke / would always carry their butts out, never throw out any trash, pick up whatever they might accidentally loose even the smallest piece. Even the ones they didn't notice falling out. Definitely nothing that could ever start a fire!
Governments / park administration on the other hand have to calculate with the worst of the worst (or at the very least what seems to be the "general public" in many instances now).
If you were in their shoes and had to make that kind of calculation would you really come to a different conclusion?
Comparison from my town: Our municipal water supply uses ground water. Personally we've always let our lawn get brown during hot spells in summer. Why waste water I could drink either this year or in future years on a green lawn?
Yet most of my neighbors would water their lawn, either manually or automatically. Same around most of town.
I applaud the municipality for enacting strict watering bans and water use restrictions including patrols! It's an inconvenience sometimes but overall it's better for all of us. This years it's pretty dry and it's been a few years that we've had these enacted and I'm noticing a much higher number of brown and dry lawns around me, which super awesome to see actually! Except for where the septic leach fields are. That's always lush green for all of us! :)
There is almost always enough water to water your lawn but you would have to cut off industrial water waste/use and cities won’t do that. So you can’t water your lawn but Coca-Cola down the block wastes thousands of cubic feet a day without a care
There's no Coca-Cola down the block from here (nor a Nestle bottling plant ;)). Nor any high water usage industries (no real "industries" at all actually). We're one of a few towns in the area with municipal wells tapping an aquifer.
The next big city does not take water from an aquifer at all but from a river. One that's also currently lower on water than usual, which is not great because upstream cities put their sewage in there and that city does the same "downstream" (which will add to the problem cities even further downstream are going to have that also use the river water).
Yeah that’s true though it can get problematic when you charge market rate and price people out. Say like when a data center moves to town and messes up electricity prices for everyone
I’m fairly certain it has much more to do with climate change than forest management, and that’s a pretty hard root cause to immediately address.
Two quick statistics I found (both government-provided) state that 40% and 85% of wildfires, Canada and US respectively, are started by humans.
Wildfires are so bad in Canada right now. If access to Crown land has to be restricted to prevent it all from literally going up in flames, than so be it.
This is what normalizing bans gets you. The proposals to ban cars or gas stoves were authoritarian already, COVID took bans further, and now “democratic” governments around the world just view bans and other authoritarian laws like age verification or chat control as normal government tools that are totally valid to use.
Canada is, on the whole, much more tolerant of socially justified restrictions like this than the US.
NS is a small province with limited resources. If a fire starts, it will become large fast, under current conditions. If that happens they will have to bring in resources from other provinces, if they aren’t already busy (they almost certainly are).
Park and land closures due to fire risk have existed for far longer than since March 2020. This isn’t normalization of authoritarianism. This is just what a more pro-socially oriented culture than the US looks like.
Reframing a violation of individual rights as good for society is literally how all authoritarianism is justified. But it still is authoritarianism.
More practically, if someone is careless enough to violate the law by lighting a fire, then this type of ban is not going to change much. Like misplaced gun control laws, it really only affects responsible law abiding citizens, and denies them their rights as individuals and taxpayers.
> Reframing a violation of individual rights as good for society is literally how all authoritarianism is justified.
Almost every individual right is balanced against the good of society. My right to free speech is not absolute, and most of the limitations in place are for the good of society. My right to not have my house entered by government agents without a warrant is not absolute, and the restrictions in place are for the good of society. Telling people to stay out of the woods during the 2nd worst fire season (so far!) on record is not authoritarianism, it is a reasonable temporary restriction in a country where 40% of wildfires are caused by people in the woods.
Restricting civil liberties during times of crisis is incredibly common across states that are not at all authoritarian, and those that very much are.
> More practically, if someone is careless enough to violate the law by lighting a fire, then this type of ban is not going to change much.
There are a lot of ways to start fires. e.g. Many are started by the catalytic converter or another hot car part coming in contact with dry brush. There have been many fires started by the sparks of a train wheel operating normally. Human caused fires don't have to be careless, it can just be random shitty chance. What asking people to stay out of the woods does is lower the chance of those random occurrences, while it also frees up patrol resources to focus on those non-law abiding forest users who you say are the problem. Double win!
> Like misplaced gun control laws, it really only affects responsible law abiding citizens, and denies them their rights as individuals and taxpayers.
Canada doesn't have a right to gun ownership. It is a privilege that is earned at the individual level and can be revoked. Nor does Canada have a right to enter Crown Land. Nor does paying taxes have anything to do with your individual rights. That sentence is great at getting emotions up, but it doesn't have any argumentative value for people who place any value in reality and logic.
> Telling people to stay out of the woods during the 2nd worst fire season (so far!) on record is not authoritarianism, it is a reasonable temporary restriction in a country where 40% of wildfires are caused by people in the woods.
As I already said, those who break laws will keep breaking laws. All this does is take away from the rights of individuals to use public land. The only benefit that is left then, is to normalize authoritarianism. Those who go to the woods and light fires unsafely will keep doing it.
> e.g. Many are started by the catalytic converter or another hot car part coming in contact with dry brush.
Evidence and data? Cars regularly go off-roading in brush and don’t start fires. If you’re saying it is incredibly rare and due to some faulty car part, then I don’t think that deserves regulation. That’s not the “40% of wildfires” you referenced as justification for this action. To make this more obvious - lightning can also start wildfires and they’ll keep happening at some low rate. Why would you try to eliminate one in a billion rarities through broad violations of liberties?
> Restricting civil liberties during times of crisis is incredibly common across states that are not at all authoritarian
Restricting civil liberties shows they’re authoritarian. You’re avoiding using this label, but to me it is accurate and deserved. The entire point of civil liberties is that they CANNOT be restricted under any circumstance. After all, the notion of a ‘crisis’ is itself open to abuse.
> That sentence is great at getting emotions up, but it doesn't have any argumentative value for people who place any value in reality and logic.
The way your list of things that you feel are not rights reads to me, is “Canada has no rights, and therefore your arguments that people have rights is false”. It doesn’t seem convincing to me, and I suspect it doesn’t to others. I think we need to start with the idea that humans have rights by default - before the authoritarianism of governments or the majority take those rights away. I also don’t like the idea of “Crown Land”, which is a way of legitimizing authoritarian culture, the idea that publicly owned things are not owed to the public but are instead held by “the Crown”.
It seems we are just going to fundamentally disagree on the position that rights can be restricted in the name of a healthy society. You think that rational actions that restrict your rights during an emergency are unacceptable and a slippery slope to authoritarianism. I understand your viewpoint, and even agree in certain cases, I just disagree that temporary restrictions on land use passed by fairly elected representatives using normal government processes lead to authoritarianism. No one is acting outside of the authority vested in them by the people. If we think they shouldn't have that power, this specific action can be challenged at the ballot box, in the courts, or in the legislature. That is hardly authoritarianism by any definition.
As I stated before, my belief (backed by centuries of examples, philosophy and legal precedent) is that individual rights are almost always in tension with a functioning society. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, in the same way that your right to play in the woods ends at our collective ability to control wildfires during record setting danger.
If you or anyone causes a fire through recklessness or, as I amply demonstrate below, completely normal human activity like driving a car, there is a good chance that you will do more damage than you could hope to pay for in your entire life. When your right to go for a walk in the woods comes with an appreciable chance of destroying an entire town, it is totally reasonable that the townspeople want you to, pretty please, postpone your walk until it rains.
> Evidence and data? Cars regularly go off-roading in brush and don’t start fires. If you’re saying it is incredibly rare and due to some faulty car part, then I don’t think that deserves regulation. That’s not the “40% of wildfires” you referenced as justification for this action. To make this more obvious - lightning can also start wildfires and they’ll keep happening at some low rate. Why would you try to eliminate one in a billion rarities through broad violations of liberties
Vehicles go off-roading in the bush and regularly start wildfires. The fact that they sometimes don't doesn't prove anything. You are dangerously wrong here. I took it as so well-known a fact that I didn't think I needed this:
Off-road motorcycles and ATVs are sold from the factory with legally required wildfire prevention equipment for this reason. Getting caught removing your spark arrestor is grounds for a massive fine. Here's a fire from this year started by an off-road motorcycle https://www.squamishchief.com/local-news/update-dirt-bike-ma...
Cars caused wildfires are incredibly common. So common that most wildfire departments have pages warning people of steps that they can take to help prevent them. Here is one of a litany of pages I was able to find with the search phrase "car caused wildfire" https://azdot.gov/blog-article/preventing-vehicle-caused-wil.... Bonus: that one cites several fires that were caused by cars.
Here is a specific fire caused by a car that caused over a billion dollars of damage including eight people burned to death and 1k homes destroyed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carr_Fire.
Here is a car caused fire in BC. The reckless rascals who caused it? The RCMP underwater search team got a flat tire responding to a missing swimmer. Bonus: that town completely burned in 2021 and the most likely cause of that fire? Sparks from a malfunctioning train wheel. Lightning might not strike twice, but in this case vehicle caused fires have. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fire-lytton-...
They are INCREDIBLY common, and more to the point, have no correlation with whether or not you are being reckless.
They are demonstrably not '1 in a billion'. They are on the order of 1 in a hundred at the low end. An order of magnitude higher than that by many estimates: Calfire estimates 10 percent of human caused fires originate from vehicles.
We can't stop lightning, but we can stop the 40% of wildfires in Canada that are human caused. Some wildfires are caused by people doing illegal things like campfires in a fire restriction, but a surprising amount of them are caused by people doing totally normal things. Here's someone that caused a wildfire by mowing their lawn: https://kmph.com/news/local/french-fire-cause-improper-lawn-...
Simply put, when conditions are like this, it is so stupidly easy to accidentally start a fire, that restricting people from the woods really does appreciably decrease risk.
> The way your list of things that you feel are not rights reads to me, is “Canada has no rights, and therefore your arguments that people have rights is false”.
I didn't say that Canadians don't have rights. I said that you are claiming that there are certain specific rights for Canadians, when in fact, that is not true. It is very easy to prove that Canadians do not have a right to own guns, hell, even the American "right" to guns is severely limited (Felons? Artillery? Many modifications like short barrelled shotguns?). It is also very easy to prove that Canadians do not have a right to unrestricted access to publicly owned land, or is the "no vehicles" gate at my nearest park put up by a dictator?
I just got back from a 3 week driving/camping trip in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI. Saw one big plume of smoke from a forest fire in New Brunswick, and the skies were tinged red with smoke in NB, Quebec, and Ontario. The forests are extremely dry. My friend's well is going dry and ground water is low. Two days ago in NB, standing outside in a breeze, it felt like a hairdryer blowing, hot and dry. If the peat lands start burning, that will burn underground and they can't stop it.
To me, having just been there, and witnessing some asshole behaviour from some of the campers, it makes total sense to close down the parks. There are not enough resources to deal with more fires there. Keep in mind these are not heavily populated provinces, so there are less resources to deal with out of control fires.
35°c, in the shade here, almost precisly on the 45'th parallel, the ground in baked hard, evrything is starting to wilt a bit, peole are getting water trucked in to there dug wells, just checked weather across the country and we seem to be about the hottest, will last a few more days, my fridge quit first thing this morning, my horse has never sought shade till today, almost no mosquitos, temp tonight will be in the mid teens, and then back up again, only good thing, is that there is no wind.........normal NS weather/climate is much much cooler and damp....to the point that mycologists come here to do field work, the only place with more mushrooms bieng somwhere in siberia
Title edited for length and clarity from the original: N.S. bans hiking and use of vehicles in woods as dry conditions raise wildfire fears
For context, the government of Canada provides https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/interactive-map to track wildfires. At time of submission, Nova Scotia is currently reporting a single wildfire — under control, at an area of 1.3 hectares. It seems there were a couple more when the story was posted. Even other Maritime provinces are currently dealing with much worse, to say nothing of the northern Prairies.
There are several hundred other wildfires currently burning across the country which has burned nearly 18 million acres this year, making it the second worst season in recorded history.. when your fire assets are all in other provinces, it makes sense to be cautious “at home”.
> Nova Scotia is currently reporting a single wildfire — under control, at an area of 1.3 hectares. It seems there were a couple more when the story was posted. Even other Maritime provinces are currently dealing with much worse, to say nothing of the northern Prairies.
Seems like Nova Scotia's fire prevention tactics (like this) are working! The time to keep people out of the woods to prevent a fire is before there is a fire.
Seems like excessive government overreach. Even California hasn't gone so far as to ban mere hiking as far as I'm aware.
Failures by the government in forestry management and firefighting shouldn't be used to restrict people's ability to enjoy nature and use public land.
They still need to solve the root problems... Lighting starts fires too and they can't outlaw that.
The comparison is unreasonable; Nova Scotia is 21,345 mi² by area, of which 75% forest, with a population of only 1.08m.
And Nova Scotia's ban is only temporary, for 12 weeks, which is wildfire season. And this year (to Aug 12) is already Canada's second-worst wildfire season on record:
>7.3 million hectares have burned [nationwide] this year so far, more than double the 10-year average for this time of year
"It's the size of New Brunswick, to put it into context," Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University, told CBC News.
The last three fire seasons are among the 10 worst on record, according to a federal database dating back to 1972, with 2023's devastating blazes taking the top spot.
"I've never seen three bad fire seasons in a row," Flannigan, who has been studying fires since the '70s, said.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/wildfire-season-2025-1.76063...
> Seems like excessive government overreach.
Wildfires start often without warning, and can spread very quickly, especially in hot, dry, windy conditions. We can never predict where a fire will start, as it could be one of many causes. Firefighting is always reactive in this regard.
This move is purely to protect people from being seriously injured, or (horrifically) burnt alive, by unexpectedly ignited fast-moving wildfires. Fire trucks and firefighters are not an unlimited resource, they can be overstretched in long campaign events with further unexpected ignitions.
As others have alluded to Australia is often accused of government overreach, but I can say that these decisions are not taken lightly as we don't want to be alarmist or restrict people's freedoms, but we also need to balance the very real threat to public safety that wildfire poses, and causes, and the available resources we have to manage new ignitions should they break out.
The language the news article uses is, in my view, misleading. "Ban" implies non-negotiable permanence and is often associated with a permanent restriction of personal freedoms, though the article, which lets face it most people don't read beyond headlines these days, is more akin to the temporary 'closure' to parts of public areas in forests and national parks, the same orders often issued by Australian fire authorities, to protect people from areas and conditions that are potentially (or are actually) dangerous to be in during elevated fire danger periods.
"Ban" sounds a lot worse than "Closure", though I also recognise this may be a legislative quirk, or confusion of terms: we have "Total Fire Ban" (government area wide, or statewide), "Park Fire Ban" and "Solid Fuel Fire Bans" (specific to individual parks, and forests respectively) that are both temporary but must be called 'bans', as those are the specific legislative tools given to us to manage ignitions.
Source: am a firefighter who has had to deal with these issues, during some very significant and internationally notable fire emergencies.
As a local to the area, a lot of the pushback is coming from the fact that this is not a closure of public parkland, but a restriction from entering any wooded area in the province - public or private.
Is the 'private' part being aggressively enforced? How many arrests (on private land)? I can't find any reports of any. Presumably Nova Scotians are voluntarily complying with the temporary ban.
> restriction from entering any wooded area in the province - public or private.
Huh, that's something new; admittedly I missed the 'private' bit. I can certainly understand why though.
Might be a cultural difference; we routinely have fire bans, parking bans, etc, and everyone knows that it's not permanent.
Is the state that routinely sets records for destructive fires - in terms of dollars and people burned to death - the one that Canada should use an example? Should we take inspiration from the country that just accidentally burned down the Grand Canyon Lodge by treating a wildfire like a controlled burn?
As someone who lives in a fire zone in Canada, I can understand why this might feel like over-reach. I can also understand that when our emergency response services are stretched thin, you might make temporary civil rights restrictions to avoid a larger tragedy.
Can you enlighten me how Canada should better manage what is the largest, or second largest, forested area in any country’s territory, in areas that are so remote as to be measured in days and 100s of KMs of travel to access. There is nowhere in the lower 48 that compares to the majority of Canadian forest lands.
Have you been to Canada’s forests? There are areas that aren’t even accessible by air attack firefighters, let alone road. The fact that most of our fires are natural compared to the majority being human caused in the US is reason enough to treat fire mitigation entirely differently, and not to use the same strategies as the US.
If people (Americans especially! I’m making an assumption based on your rhetoric, and the similarity to American right wing talking points) could stop with trying to tell Canada nonsensical things about the forests, many of us would appreciate it.
Most states of Australia (which, yes, is the anglosphere capital of government overreach) ban most hiking on government land on days that are rated catastrophic fire danger.
Not for months at a time, though.
Also, to be fair, most people here on HN will probably go with their own habits: They'd be great stewards of nature. They don't smoke / would always carry their butts out, never throw out any trash, pick up whatever they might accidentally loose even the smallest piece. Even the ones they didn't notice falling out. Definitely nothing that could ever start a fire!
Governments / park administration on the other hand have to calculate with the worst of the worst (or at the very least what seems to be the "general public" in many instances now).
If you were in their shoes and had to make that kind of calculation would you really come to a different conclusion?
Comparison from my town: Our municipal water supply uses ground water. Personally we've always let our lawn get brown during hot spells in summer. Why waste water I could drink either this year or in future years on a green lawn?
Yet most of my neighbors would water their lawn, either manually or automatically. Same around most of town.
I applaud the municipality for enacting strict watering bans and water use restrictions including patrols! It's an inconvenience sometimes but overall it's better for all of us. This years it's pretty dry and it's been a few years that we've had these enacted and I'm noticing a much higher number of brown and dry lawns around me, which super awesome to see actually! Except for where the septic leach fields are. That's always lush green for all of us! :)
There is almost always enough water to water your lawn but you would have to cut off industrial water waste/use and cities won’t do that. So you can’t water your lawn but Coca-Cola down the block wastes thousands of cubic feet a day without a care
There's no Coca-Cola down the block from here (nor a Nestle bottling plant ;)). Nor any high water usage industries (no real "industries" at all actually). We're one of a few towns in the area with municipal wells tapping an aquifer.
The next big city does not take water from an aquifer at all but from a river. One that's also currently lower on water than usual, which is not great because upstream cities put their sewage in there and that city does the same "downstream" (which will add to the problem cities even further downstream are going to have that also use the river water).
Inefficiencies like this are due to not charging a proper market price for water.
Yeah that’s true though it can get problematic when you charge market rate and price people out. Say like when a data center moves to town and messes up electricity prices for everyone
I’m fairly certain it has much more to do with climate change than forest management, and that’s a pretty hard root cause to immediately address.
Two quick statistics I found (both government-provided) state that 40% and 85% of wildfires, Canada and US respectively, are started by humans.
Wildfires are so bad in Canada right now. If access to Crown land has to be restricted to prevent it all from literally going up in flames, than so be it.
It’s not only crown land in this case - it’s all land, public or private.
[dead]
Has anyone let Ranger Gord know?
This is what normalizing bans gets you. The proposals to ban cars or gas stoves were authoritarian already, COVID took bans further, and now “democratic” governments around the world just view bans and other authoritarian laws like age verification or chat control as normal government tools that are totally valid to use.
Canada is, on the whole, much more tolerant of socially justified restrictions like this than the US.
NS is a small province with limited resources. If a fire starts, it will become large fast, under current conditions. If that happens they will have to bring in resources from other provinces, if they aren’t already busy (they almost certainly are).
Park and land closures due to fire risk have existed for far longer than since March 2020. This isn’t normalization of authoritarianism. This is just what a more pro-socially oriented culture than the US looks like.
Reframing a violation of individual rights as good for society is literally how all authoritarianism is justified. But it still is authoritarianism.
More practically, if someone is careless enough to violate the law by lighting a fire, then this type of ban is not going to change much. Like misplaced gun control laws, it really only affects responsible law abiding citizens, and denies them their rights as individuals and taxpayers.
> Reframing a violation of individual rights as good for society is literally how all authoritarianism is justified.
Almost every individual right is balanced against the good of society. My right to free speech is not absolute, and most of the limitations in place are for the good of society. My right to not have my house entered by government agents without a warrant is not absolute, and the restrictions in place are for the good of society. Telling people to stay out of the woods during the 2nd worst fire season (so far!) on record is not authoritarianism, it is a reasonable temporary restriction in a country where 40% of wildfires are caused by people in the woods.
Restricting civil liberties during times of crisis is incredibly common across states that are not at all authoritarian, and those that very much are.
> More practically, if someone is careless enough to violate the law by lighting a fire, then this type of ban is not going to change much.
There are a lot of ways to start fires. e.g. Many are started by the catalytic converter or another hot car part coming in contact with dry brush. There have been many fires started by the sparks of a train wheel operating normally. Human caused fires don't have to be careless, it can just be random shitty chance. What asking people to stay out of the woods does is lower the chance of those random occurrences, while it also frees up patrol resources to focus on those non-law abiding forest users who you say are the problem. Double win!
> Like misplaced gun control laws, it really only affects responsible law abiding citizens, and denies them their rights as individuals and taxpayers.
Canada doesn't have a right to gun ownership. It is a privilege that is earned at the individual level and can be revoked. Nor does Canada have a right to enter Crown Land. Nor does paying taxes have anything to do with your individual rights. That sentence is great at getting emotions up, but it doesn't have any argumentative value for people who place any value in reality and logic.
> Telling people to stay out of the woods during the 2nd worst fire season (so far!) on record is not authoritarianism, it is a reasonable temporary restriction in a country where 40% of wildfires are caused by people in the woods.
As I already said, those who break laws will keep breaking laws. All this does is take away from the rights of individuals to use public land. The only benefit that is left then, is to normalize authoritarianism. Those who go to the woods and light fires unsafely will keep doing it.
> e.g. Many are started by the catalytic converter or another hot car part coming in contact with dry brush.
Evidence and data? Cars regularly go off-roading in brush and don’t start fires. If you’re saying it is incredibly rare and due to some faulty car part, then I don’t think that deserves regulation. That’s not the “40% of wildfires” you referenced as justification for this action. To make this more obvious - lightning can also start wildfires and they’ll keep happening at some low rate. Why would you try to eliminate one in a billion rarities through broad violations of liberties?
> Restricting civil liberties during times of crisis is incredibly common across states that are not at all authoritarian
Restricting civil liberties shows they’re authoritarian. You’re avoiding using this label, but to me it is accurate and deserved. The entire point of civil liberties is that they CANNOT be restricted under any circumstance. After all, the notion of a ‘crisis’ is itself open to abuse.
> That sentence is great at getting emotions up, but it doesn't have any argumentative value for people who place any value in reality and logic.
The way your list of things that you feel are not rights reads to me, is “Canada has no rights, and therefore your arguments that people have rights is false”. It doesn’t seem convincing to me, and I suspect it doesn’t to others. I think we need to start with the idea that humans have rights by default - before the authoritarianism of governments or the majority take those rights away. I also don’t like the idea of “Crown Land”, which is a way of legitimizing authoritarian culture, the idea that publicly owned things are not owed to the public but are instead held by “the Crown”.
It seems we are just going to fundamentally disagree on the position that rights can be restricted in the name of a healthy society. You think that rational actions that restrict your rights during an emergency are unacceptable and a slippery slope to authoritarianism. I understand your viewpoint, and even agree in certain cases, I just disagree that temporary restrictions on land use passed by fairly elected representatives using normal government processes lead to authoritarianism. No one is acting outside of the authority vested in them by the people. If we think they shouldn't have that power, this specific action can be challenged at the ballot box, in the courts, or in the legislature. That is hardly authoritarianism by any definition.
As I stated before, my belief (backed by centuries of examples, philosophy and legal precedent) is that individual rights are almost always in tension with a functioning society. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, in the same way that your right to play in the woods ends at our collective ability to control wildfires during record setting danger.
If you or anyone causes a fire through recklessness or, as I amply demonstrate below, completely normal human activity like driving a car, there is a good chance that you will do more damage than you could hope to pay for in your entire life. When your right to go for a walk in the woods comes with an appreciable chance of destroying an entire town, it is totally reasonable that the townspeople want you to, pretty please, postpone your walk until it rains.
> Evidence and data? Cars regularly go off-roading in brush and don’t start fires. If you’re saying it is incredibly rare and due to some faulty car part, then I don’t think that deserves regulation. That’s not the “40% of wildfires” you referenced as justification for this action. To make this more obvious - lightning can also start wildfires and they’ll keep happening at some low rate. Why would you try to eliminate one in a billion rarities through broad violations of liberties
Vehicles go off-roading in the bush and regularly start wildfires. The fact that they sometimes don't doesn't prove anything. You are dangerously wrong here. I took it as so well-known a fact that I didn't think I needed this:
Off-road motorcycles and ATVs are sold from the factory with legally required wildfire prevention equipment for this reason. Getting caught removing your spark arrestor is grounds for a massive fine. Here's a fire from this year started by an off-road motorcycle https://www.squamishchief.com/local-news/update-dirt-bike-ma...
Cars caused wildfires are incredibly common. So common that most wildfire departments have pages warning people of steps that they can take to help prevent them. Here is one of a litany of pages I was able to find with the search phrase "car caused wildfire" https://azdot.gov/blog-article/preventing-vehicle-caused-wil.... Bonus: that one cites several fires that were caused by cars.
Here is a specific fire caused by a car that caused over a billion dollars of damage including eight people burned to death and 1k homes destroyed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carr_Fire.
Here is a car caused fire in BC. The reckless rascals who caused it? The RCMP underwater search team got a flat tire responding to a missing swimmer. Bonus: that town completely burned in 2021 and the most likely cause of that fire? Sparks from a malfunctioning train wheel. Lightning might not strike twice, but in this case vehicle caused fires have. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fire-lytton-...
They are INCREDIBLY common, and more to the point, have no correlation with whether or not you are being reckless.
They are demonstrably not '1 in a billion'. They are on the order of 1 in a hundred at the low end. An order of magnitude higher than that by many estimates: Calfire estimates 10 percent of human caused fires originate from vehicles.
We can't stop lightning, but we can stop the 40% of wildfires in Canada that are human caused. Some wildfires are caused by people doing illegal things like campfires in a fire restriction, but a surprising amount of them are caused by people doing totally normal things. Here's someone that caused a wildfire by mowing their lawn: https://kmph.com/news/local/french-fire-cause-improper-lawn-...
Simply put, when conditions are like this, it is so stupidly easy to accidentally start a fire, that restricting people from the woods really does appreciably decrease risk.
> The way your list of things that you feel are not rights reads to me, is “Canada has no rights, and therefore your arguments that people have rights is false”.
I didn't say that Canadians don't have rights. I said that you are claiming that there are certain specific rights for Canadians, when in fact, that is not true. It is very easy to prove that Canadians do not have a right to own guns, hell, even the American "right" to guns is severely limited (Felons? Artillery? Many modifications like short barrelled shotguns?). It is also very easy to prove that Canadians do not have a right to unrestricted access to publicly owned land, or is the "no vehicles" gate at my nearest park put up by a dictator?
I’m still not sure I agree, but I appreciate a thoughtful response. Have a good day.
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