In an article on the Policy Magazine website, Thomas Axworthy, Public Policy Chair at Massey College in Canada discusses the country’s water-fire national security crisis. arguing that there is no room for backsliding. This is an important argument for more than Canada.
Fire, Water, and National Security: Why Canada Cannot Backslide
In September of 2023, Michael Miltenberger, former deputy premier of the Northwest Territories, spoke at a Massey College-Forum for Leadership on Water conference called The Future of Freshwater. Miltenberger described how just weeks earlier, wildfire had forced the evacuation of his own community of Fort Smith (yes, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s hometown). As he prepared to escape the Wood Buffalo Complex Wildfire, which was consuming everything in its path, Miltenberger recalled, he “thanked his house for sheltering him and his family all these years, thinking we may not have a home to come back to.”
Fire and water are more than just classical elements in any wildfire disaster. Fire was the antagonist in Miltenberger’s story, and water was the protagonist whose absence enabled it. Because water performs three roles in wildfire narratives: as a suppression agent preventing wildfires, as a landscape moderator pre-empting wildfires, and as a crisis containment and extinguishing agent once a wildfire has erupted.
Miltenberger’s experience captured that dynamic at its worst: a drying forest, a warming atmosphere, and a containment crisis far beyond the capacity of any single government department. He made the connections—emotional and analytical—that most Canadians have not yet been forced to make.
Canada is entering a period when floods, fires, drought, and extreme heat no longer appear as episodic climate-change symptoms and environmental problems but as interconnected forces transforming the very foundations of national security.
What we are confronting today is not “environmental” in the narrow sense. It more widely implicates safety, governance, continuity, and survival.
Following the success of the 2023 conference, Miltenberger persuaded his friend John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, (reviewed in Policy, June 2023) to give the keynote at our September 2025 follow-up event, Ensuring the Flow: Water Security for Canada and the World.
Vaillant’s message was stark: we are not facing a “big environmental problem” but a civilizational pivot.
Drawing on his research into the devastating 2016 Fort McMurray fire, Vaillant argued that we are now in the dangerous phase a trajectory famously described by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises. When asked how he went bankrupt, Mike Campbell replies: “Two ways. Gradually, and then suddenly.”
That is where we are now. The gradual phase is over. The sudden phase is upon us.
The physical evidence is overwhelming:
- The 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome killed more than 600 people in British Columbia.
- Lytton, B.C., recorded the highest temperature in Canadian history—49.6°C—before wildfire destroyed the town.
- In 2023, extreme fires forced 70% of Northwest Territories residents to evacuate.
- Jasper, Alberta, evacuated its 25,000 residents from wildfires in 2024.
- In 2025, Winnipeg housed more than 20,000 climate refugees from Northern Manitoba.
We now live, as Vaillant put it, in the Pyrocene Age—the fire equivalent of the Ice Age.
In this context, water security is no longer an environmental aspiration. It is an existential imperative. Public Safety Canada defines the government’s first responsibility as protecting the “safety and security of Canadians.”
That duty now requires treating the water–fire nexus as a national security threat.
Yet our systems lag dangerously behind. Canada still lacks:
- a continental-scale water-bomber strategy;
- integrated, national fire modelling and command structures;
- climate-ready military doctrine;
- modern infrastructure resilient to heat, drought, and flood;
- full partnership with Indigenous knowledge keepers.
In short, we are fighting future fires with past methods.
The U.S. Backslide—and Canada’s Warning
For years, the United States led the world—including Canada—in treating climate change as a national security threat. The Pentagon was the first major defence institution to publish climate-risk assessments, map vulnerabilities across bases, and integrate climate disruption into readiness doctrine. In 2015, the U.S. went further still, identifying climate change as a core national security threat in its National Security Strategy—a framing Canada had not yet adopted.
Today, that leadership has collapsed. As The Guardian reported on October 15, 2025, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth dismissed climate science as “climate change crap” and ordered the Pentagon to remove climate-security language from its planning.
A country that once pioneered the global climate-security agenda is now dismantling it—turning its back on research and doctrine Canada is only beginning to internalize — as it has dismantled so many multilateral response and solution systems, from trade rules to public health collaboration to international development networks.
How is this possible? Part of the answer, at least in the sense of skewed public perception and a deficit of urgency, lies in the insights of Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert argues that the human brain evolved to detect threats that are intentional, imminent, instantaneous, and immoral. Climate change fits none of these. It is slow, statistical, impersonal, and abstract.
As Gilbert writes, climate change is “a beautifully crafted threat designed to go under our natural radar, to be invisible.”
Is Canada Backsliding Too?
If the U.S. has retreated, Canada’s recent record offers little comfort. Mark Carney entered office with a strong reputation as a climate-policy advocate. As Governor of the Bank of England, his 2015 speech “Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon” warned that climate impacts occur beyond the planning horizons of most actors, imposing costs on future generations with no incentive for action today. As UN Special Envoy on Climate Finance, he called climate change “the world’s greatest existential threat.”
Yet, as former business journalist Shawn McCarthy quipped in The Hill Times, “Mark Carney, the prime minister, would do well to heed Mark Carney the author.”
The November 27, 2025, resignation of Steven Guilbeault from Carney’s cabinet tells the story. Guilbeault listed a series of reversals or delays in Liberal climate policy: the carbon tax, zero-emission vehicle standards, the oil and gas sector emissions cap, and clean-electricity rules. The newly announced memorandum of understanding with Alberta—trading federal regulatory rollback and a new pipeline for Alberta’s support of carbon capture—has further clouded Carney’s environmental and climate change credentials.
Canada is far from achieving its climate commitments. Under the Paris Agreement, we pledged to reduce emissions by 40–45% below 2005 levels by 2030; the latest federal figures show only an 8.5% reduction so far. Canada is the world’s 11th-largest emitter and has the second-highest emissions per capita among major economies. On the Climate Change Performance Index, Canada ranks 61st out of 63 countries.
Some of Carney’s choices reflect political reality: the need to stabilize relations with provinces, particularly Alberta, and to build an economy resilient to the pressures of a second Trump administration. But political realities do not alter physical realities. The water–fire crisis will not wait.
A National Security Priority
The water–fire nexus is now one of the defining security challenges of 21st-century Canada. Thousands of Canadians annually face evacuation, home loss, and health risks. Fire, drought, and extreme heat threaten infrastructure, ecosystems, and food and water systems.
If this is not a national security priority, what is?
Climate change arrived gradually, and it has now taken hold suddenly.
Our response must be:
Urgent, not gradual.
Immediate, not deferred.
Strategic, not fragmented.
Canada still has time—but not much—to build a secure future for its people, its waters, and its lands.
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Energy in Demand - Sustainable Energy - Rod Janssen 