The smoke in Fort Smith last Thursday was thick, heavy and dark. We had trouble breathing. Almost instantly, we were transported back to the summer of 2023 and the panic we felt then.
I raced to the nearest government office to find out what was happening worried the fires were burning all over again. I had forgotten how hard it was to breathe in that smoke and the trauma of knowing fires were nearby.
The worker assured me it was not wildfires, even though I had seen smoke near the turn off to Fort Smith by Hay River. I had heard people talk about them but seeing smouldering sites was an ominous foreboding.
In Fort Smith that day, they were just burning some of the many burn piles that had accumulated during the nightmare fire season last summer effectively levelling Wood Buffalo National Park and nearby areas.
The burn coincided with gatherings called that night so that residents could have their say about how last year’s evacuation was handled. With nicely set up tables and microphones scattered throughout the hall, those who attended characterized this event as a “joke.”
Attendee after attendee repeated the phrase and their frustration that this public meeting was more like a social get-together than an opportunity to be heard. Months of pent-up anger and angst could not be released fast enough, something they had hoped to do. Whoever set up the meeting and the park wardens in attendance likely had good intentions, but it didn’t meet the needs.
Others just shook their heads saying that the evacuation itself — amid the smoke, the flames, the panic and fear — was chaos. Chaos is indeed the only way to describe how residents throughout the burn area described the evacuation of 2023.
This week in Yellowknife, residents will be able to tell the city how they felt about the handling of the evacuation, too. Though we had been told there was a plan to move residents from one side of the city to another, depending on the movement of the fire, we knew that the plan was one word long: Run!
Though people readied their boats, while others headed south or to other safer locations, many relied on the territorial government to guide them through those perilous times. It came as no surprise that the GNWT took over and after evacuating their own staff, it gave the residents two days to get out of the city. The fear that this messaging evoked sent people barreling down crammed, dangerous highways at night; in some cases, they driving vehicles that were barely road worthy.
It was a call that endangered the lives of adults and kids alike. They slept at the side of the road in crammed quarters paying for food and gas out of their own pockets.
We learned the hard way that the GNWT evacuation plan echoed that of the city’s.
It came as a shock that even though MLAs called for an independent review, the GNWT says it will consider one after it has finished its own. Once again, it begs the question: who runs the government?
The city, then, is to be congratulated for holding the event and the public needs to step forward and say exactly what is on its mind. The GNWT might want to listen.
Some have said that an independent review would be costly. So would not doing one and those costs would include the hidden ones of another evacuation, importing more fire firefighters, building new homes, lost wages, lost school time and, of course, mental health services for those suffering from losses and impacts of all kinds. The true cost of forest fires is not just what is on the surface.
Expecting a governing body to review its actions is like expecting the police to conduct a thorough internal review. It can’t happen.
Instead, what we need at both the municipal and territorial government levels is a hybrid of government personnel and outsiders who know how a thorough independent review is conducted, not just another contract awarded to friends. Steeped in its lack of transparency and failure to consult, a believable study is something governments alone cannot do.
This week, make your voice heard. We know the fires are coming — it is inevitable. When we stand up for ourselves, we stand up for everyone.
—Nancy Vail is a longtime Yellowknifer concerned with social justice.