Canada Is Burning In Places It Didn't Burn Before; Atlantic And Prairie Provinces The Heart Of 2025 Fire Season

Road closures, evacuations, travel chaos and stern warnings from officials have all become fixtures of Canada’s wildfire season. But as the country goes through its second-worst burn on record, the blazes come with a twist: few are coming from the western provinces, the traditional centre of destruction. Instead, the worst of the fires have been concentrated in the prairie provinces and the Atlantic region, with bone-dry conditions upending how Canada responds to a threat which is only likely to grow as the climate warms.

Experts say the shift serves as a stark reminder that the risk of disaster is present across the thickly forested nation. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of people in communities across the country have been evacuated due to the wildfires. Saskatchewan and Manitoba have been the worst hit, home to more than 60% of the volume burned in Canada. But the fires have also seized strained resources in Atlantic Canada, where officials in Newfoundland and Labrador are struggling to battle out of control blazes.

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“Conditions are really dry, there’s no rain in sight, the risk is extremely high in Nova Scotia,” the province’s premier Tim Houston told reporters. “I’m happy to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to protect people, to protect property and try to just get through this fire season and really just pray for rain.” Fires have even erupted in Ontario’s Kawartha Lakes region, a collection of rural communities less than 100 miles (161km) north of Toronto that are a popular summer destination for residents of Canada’s largest city.

For a country of sprawling landmass, fires have long been a common feature of the hot spring, summer and fall. But for the last century, a mix of geography, climate and industry meant that the biggest and hottest fires – and the vast majority of destruction – have been concentrated in Canada’s western provinces. That changed in 2023 when Canada experienced its worst-ever fire season and the thick haze of smoke blanketed the US. “We had fire everywhere. We had evacuations everywhere. We had smoke at a scale that was remarkable. And so for the first time, we had a different thought about wildfires as a country. With all of the smoke, it became a global conversation. This year is repeating all of that,” said Paul Kovacs, the executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction at Western University. “This is a national issue. This can show up anywhere.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/17/new-canada-wildfires-locations