The summer the sun turned red: Canadians wake up to the reality of climate change under a veil of smoke

A red sun over Montreal. Crops withering in the field. Thousands of people fleeing a territorial capital. Smoke blanketing cities from Toronto to Ottawa to New York.

These are not scenes out of a dystopian novel but pulled straight from Canada’s summer of fire and smoke, now cresting in the frightening evacuations of Yellowknife and Kelowna.

Severe wildfires from Nova Scotia to British Columbia have cast a literal pall over the country – just as they have wreaked havoc around the world, from Maui to Greece to China – both as an everyday irritant and health scare, and as a dark manifestation of global warming. The more than 20,000 residents of the Northwest Territories who have been ordered to leave their homes, often along highways turned into corridors of flame, comes as the latest and most extreme reminder that the effects of a heating planet are literally at our doors.

Devon Allie, a 24-year-old software engineer living in Montreal, said the thick veil of smoke that descended on the city in June made him think of a volcanic eruption.

“For so long we’ve heard about climate change but you’ve never felt the impact so clearly and starkly,” he said. “When you see the whole city covered in smoke, which never happens, it’s a real show-stopper. Especially when the sun turns red. You can’t get more apocalyptic than that.”

On the front lines, firefighters have tried to beat the blazes back and at least four of them have lost their lives. But the situation has also affected countless Canadians in other ways, both materially and psychologically, as people across the country report a sense of dread about the disaster unfolding just out of sight, and what it portends for the future.

Yellowknife resident Maggie Works has been grappling with that additional fear as she flees from the encroaching fire. She didn’t wait for an official evacuation order to pack her “go bags” – a new phrase in the lexicons of many Canadians – and by Wednesday at noon, she and her partner were on the road, passing through the remains of Enterprise, a remote hamlet of about 100 that was decimated by a wildfire on the weekend.

“With the reality of climate change, I am worried that these wildfires are just going to get even more wild,” she said. “Climate change has affected the whole world this summer with the wildfires destroying parts of Hawaii, flash floods in Halifax. It’s just craziness all over. I hope that the federal government realizes this and takes action before it gets even worse.”

Climate anxiety has plagued many Canadians for years, and the recent past has provided plenty of warning signs to elicit it, from drought to extreme heat. But for many, this summer’s raging fires and smoky skies have brought home our new environmental reality like never before.

“It sure feels like all of Canada is burning right now,” said John Vaillant, the Canadian-American author of the newly released non-fiction book Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World.

The number of air quality bulletins issued by Environment Canada gives some indication of how smoky 2023 has been, as forest fires have struck from coast to coast, and often in regions, like the Maritimes and Quebec, that are unaccustomed to them. Between 2017 and 2022, the average number of warnings issued during wildfire season was 897. This year, the ministry has already released 3,166, more than three times as many.

The effects of wildfires and their smoke have been as wide-ranging and diverse as the country itself, running the gamut from panicked evacuations to lost income to various forms of psychological distress and adaptation. Although Western Canada has been experiencing more severe forest fires for several years now – “While the rest of the continent is aghast at what they have to deal with, for B.C. (and Alberta) what you are seeing is the usual,” said New Westminster, B.C., resident Tommy Wharton – the new experience of burning forests, and sometimes burning cities, has come as a shocking blow to many in the rest of Canada.

Flames tearing through whole communities has been the most vivid and painful experience of this extreme weather season. Spring in Nova Scotia is usually wet and chilly, not hot and bone dry like it was this year, setting the conditions for a massive wildfire that tore through the suburban Halifax neighbourhoods of Upper Tantallon and Hammonds Plains, burning 151 homes and forcing the evacuation of 16,000 people.

Hammonds Plains-St. Margarets councillor Pam Lovelace recalled the chaos and fear as the call to evacuate came via emergency alert to some, but not all people’s cellphones, in part because of patchy cellular coverage in the area.

“It certainly solidified the fact that any kind of gradual shift in the climate and then the weather patterns could very quickly turn into a catastrophic event,” said Ms. Lovelace, who herself was evacuated from her Hammonds Plains home for a week.

Renée Hynes, a teacher and mother of four boys, is still living in a hotel, awaiting long-term housing after the historic wildfire destroyed her family’s six-bedroom home in Upper Tantallon nearly three months ago. She and her six-year-old twins and 10- and 12-year-olds were playing road hockey in the driveway on a hot Sunday afternoon when she noticed a plume of grey smoke over their treed two-acre property and a stream of cars driving down her usually quiet street. Ms. Hynes grabbed her purse and piled the kids into the minivan – two of them without shoes. “I never would’ve dreamt in a million years that a huge wildfire was taking place and we would never be coming back to our family home again,” she said.

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For a larger group of Canadians who have escaped the worst of the fires, the blazes have nonetheless created economic stress, and promise to continue sharing the pain in years to come. While the wildfires burned in southwest Nova Scotia in the spring, Christmas tree growers – an industry that generates $52-million per year – were forced out of their woods.

“This did have an impact on their work,” said Brittany Frenette, general manager of the Christmas Tree Council of Nova Scotia. “There are obvious concerns about the risk for the future.”

The lobster fishery in Atlantic Canada is worth $2-billion and employs about 13,000 fishermen directly on the water, but they can’t operate their boats in the ocean when there is smoke – something hundreds of fishermen experienced while working this spring.

Wildfire smoke blew 10 nautical miles offshore in southwest Nova Scotia and was so thick fishermen couldn’t see over the sides of their boats, said Dan Fleck, executive director of the Brazil Rock Lobster Association, which represents 538 fishermen from all over mainland Nova Scotia. Captains, concerned about damaging their vessel and for their crew’s respiratory health, departed early, cutting into everyone’s potential earnings.

For some business people, the fires have forced hard, anxious choices between carrying on and the health of their families. Hannah Wong is the sole owner and operator of a small farm in eastern Ontario. She is also pregnant. When the air quality got bad in June she started reading about how prolonged wildfire smoke exposure can lower birth weight and trigger preterm labour.

So she took about a week off, blasting the air purifier indoors. She felt lucky to have that option, but the harvest suffered.

An even wider basin of Canadians who did not experienced material hardship because of the fires have still been left carrying a heavy mental weight as they watch their towns and cities grow shrouded in smoke and, sometimes for the first time, feel the personal impact of global warming.

“There have been in the last couple years these cardinal events that open people’s eyes, said David Eisenman, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who has studied the psychological effects of wildfire smoke globally, including in Canada. “It’s happening here now and affecting them immediately, affecting their families immediately, and affecting their health immediately.”

Studies increasingly point to the serious mental health toll that living with wildfire smoke can take. A 2022 review of the existing literature by Prof. Eisenman and Lindsay Galway of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, found evidence that in certain contexts, the psychological effects can be serious, pointing to the need for more research.

In a study of Australian children after major 2003 wildfires, the authors found that those who saw smoke scored much higher on a screening tool that can be predictive of psychiatric diagnoses. After the Southeast Asian Haze Crisis of 2013, researchers in another study reported that Singapore residents experienced symptoms including “irritability, being easily startled, insomnia, poor concentration, and physical reactions after reminders of the haze.”

Some Indigenous people in the Northwest Territories during 2014′s “summer of smoke,” meanwhile, found themselves afflicted by what researchers have described as “solastalgia”: a sense of longing for the land and the outdoors that can be brought on by confinement indoors during wildfires.

“It was the lost summer,” said one study participant. “The attachment to the land and place, what it does, and when you get alienated, you know, from that place … it takes a deep, emotional toll, if not a spiritual toll.”

The emotional toll of the fire and smoke this summer has rippled across the country, awakening even the most unlikely people to the imminent dangers of global warming. John Possian is, according to his daughter Amara, “the most chill human being ever.” He prefers linen pants, smokes cigars, loves flamenco music, and enjoys telling more anxious family members that they’re overreacting to things.

But earlier this summer, to Amara’s surprise, he called her from Cuba out of the blue, stress audible in his voice, to ask whether she was okay. “He said he was worried about the forest fires, the smoke,” she recalled from Toronto, where she lives. “He told me to stay inside, to stay safe. And he said, ‘I guess climate change has something to do with this.’ ”

Amidst all of this distress, some Canadians have leaned on unexpected coping methods, trying to find thin silver linings in the dark cloud that has hung over the country for much of the summer. In June, Montreal was choked by smog from fires in northern Quebec, leaving local artists both disturbed and intrigued by the dense grey skies. Sabrina Ratté, a digital artist whose work meditates on dystopia, was struck by how the wildfire smoke changed the quality of the urban light in dramatic ways.

“I’m so fascinated by how the colours are so different and the sun becomes red,” she said during a panel discussion at the Arsenal Contemporary Art gallery. “It’s kind of scary how this apocalyptic situation can reveal these terrifying beauties.”

Added Alice Jarry, an artist-researcher and professor at Concordia University’s department of Design and Computation Arts: “Now you can literally feel it, taste it – breathe the fire.”

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While they breathed the fire, some Canadians tried to guard against despair at the prospect of facing more of the same in the future. The Montreal book publisher Mark Fortier posted a cri-de-coeur on Facebook in June calling for more serious action against the global warming that has aggravated forest fires and threatens to make conditions like these more common. Trying to do something positive in the face of such a bleak outlook struck him as the only choice.

“Someone asked Martin Luther what he would do if God told him the world was ending, and he replied, ‘I would plant an apple tree,’” said the avowedly secular Mr. Fortier. “We plant a tree and then who knows. God changes his mind sometimes.”

With reports from Nancy Macdonald, Alanna Smith, and The Canadian Press