“It’s like playing Whack-A-Mole… the misinformation online spreads, I swear, faster than facts.”
––Jilly Laviolette
Wildfire scientists and emergency service providers say they’re frustrated they must constantly counter false claims that arson is a leading cause of wildfires in B.C.
In fact, figures obtained by Northern Beat show arson or suspicious fires accounted for fewer than five percent of all wildfires reported by the BC Wildfire Service from 2013 to 2023, and only .05 per cent of total hectares burned.
Nor does arson seem to be on the increase. Last year, arson and suspicious fires accounted for 2.4 percent of all incidents reported to the BCWS, and only 271 hectares of a record 2,842,296 hectares burned, or .009 per cent.
But that doesn’t reflect many social media rants. The platforms are often full of angry comments from those who insist arsonists, even paid arsonists, are the culprits.
“Arson isn’t climate change,” is a popular refrain on X, formerly known as Twitter.
There are many others:
“You forgot to mention it was arson, or does that not fit the globalists NWO (New World Order) narrative? Agenda 2030.”
“Arson is making wildfires more prevalent. Someone, call David Suzuki.”
And so it goes in the overheated world of social media.
Grassroots group becomes credible wildfire resource
Jilly Laviolette has seen and heard all the claims. She refuses to play along.
“Oh, my goodness! It will drive me crazy if I allow it,” says Laviolette, an administrator of the volunteer-driven Facebook site, BC Wildfire Updates, Resources and Photos Page which offers information about wildfires, evacuations, road closures, power outages, and emergency services, steering clear of political diatribes and accusations.
Laviolette lives in Port Hardy, on northern Vancouver Island. She isn’t a wildfire scientist or a technical pro. She is, in her own words, “a Jill-of-all-trades,” a single mother who works as a support worker at an Indigenous healing centre, who has also worked as a cleaner for the local school district, and even finds time to serve as a wildlife rescuer.
The BC Wildfire Updates site struck a chord with fire-weary residents of rural B.C. Membership grew from a few hundred people when it was launched nine years ago, to 15,000 this spring and 51,000 today.
“In the last couple of years, it’s really taken off,” says Laviolette. “When there are big fires, it quickly becomes a resource for people to find information, because a lot of the time people don’t understand what the BC Wildfire Service is talking about. It’s a lot of jargon or it’s a lot of technical talk. So, we just kind of break it down into easier terms for people to understand.”
‘We’re accurate. We’re verified.’
But this year the administrators decided to crack down on the many comments suggesting arsonists with a political agenda were roaming the countryside starting fires.
“It’s like playing Whack-A-Mole. One person pops up and we get them settled down. Then the next person will pop up, and oh my, the misinformation online spreads, I swear, faster than facts.”
Laviolette and her fellow volunteers now insist everything must be factual.
“The information we’re sharing was verified. It wasn’t like, oh, Joe Blow has heard this. It was like photos of what was actually going on from people in the area, and information. So, it’s only from there that it’s grown. Because people know we’re not spreading conspiracies.
“We’re truthful. We’re accurate. We’re verified.”
“The information we’re sharing was verified. People know we’re not spreading conspiracies.”
Jilly Laviolette
Thousands of followers on the Facebook site appreciate that approach. As one says, “It is refreshing to read all of a group’s posts without having to cull through toxic political rants, abuse of government officials, conspiracy theories etc.”
But at first, the administrators’ policy of curating comments and sticking to the facts got a lot of pushback.
“It was pretty crazy,” Laviolette says. “People were calling us part of Justin Trudeau’s troop, we were trying to censor, and people were quite upset. But it was all the conspiracy theorists, right? It wasn’t the people who understand how science works.”
Most wildfires start by lightning strikes
The people who work on the front lines of wildfire fighting and emergency services share similar stories.
“It’s frustrating, you know” says John Paolozzi, a communications officer with the BC Wildfire Service in Nelson, “because we can tell people why it (arson) is not happening. We can tell them that it’s lightning. We can tell them that there are human-caused fires, definitely. But there’s a wide range of human-caused fires.”
Paolozzi says that category can include anything from runaway campfires to backyard burning that got out of control.
“It can be equipment, it can be railroads, it can be smoking, and it can be vehicles,” says Paolozzi. “Offroad vehicles bombing through the bush, either sparks are flying into their exhaust system, or their metal parts are banging on the rocks and sparking extremely dry conditions on fire.”
“[The cause] can be equipment, it can be railroads, it can be smoking, and it can be vehicles.”
John Paolozzi
The BC Wildfire Service typically doesn’t break down wildfire statistics on its website; it simply says that over the long-term, about 60 per cent of wildfires are caused by lightning and most of the others by humans, while some causes remain unknown.
In fact, the ratio has shifted towards lightning over the last two years: last year, 71 per cent of fires were traced to lightning, and so far this year, 72 per cent are classed as lightning-caused, 23 per cent as human-caused and four per cent as undetermined. As of Aug. 18, the numbers are even more striking after days of thunderstorms. Ninety per cent of 330 active fires in BC were caused by lightning, and the others equally split between human and undetermined causes.
Now, at the request of Northern Beat, the BCWS has shared detailed statistics.
They show that lightning strikes not only accounted for more fires, but also for the bigger ones: 85.6 per cent of all hectares burned over the decade and a whopping 96 per cent last year.
This year has also been a bad one for lightning. On one day in mid-July, BCWS recorded 38,000 strikes.
There are a number of reasons why lightning-caused fires tend to be larger. Lightning can strike at higher elevations and harder-to-reach locations, Paolozzi says.
“Human-caused fires are more likely to happen near communities. This is where we live, work, and play. Any fire near a community will get a full response, meaning it will be suppressed and controlled until it is deemed to be out. Whereas fires that are remote and don’t pose a threat are more likely to get a modified response, which means it will be monitored and managed using techniques to minimize damage, while maximizing ecological benefits of fire.”
Campfires and yard burning top human-caused fires
The idea that wildfires bring benefits may be a tough one for rural residents to swallow. But wildfire scientists say wildfire is part of the landscape, and a century of fire suppression has left a huge fuel load in the forest that’s now a constant threat.
Lightning strikes have sparked hundreds of fires this year and last, but there are many other causes.
That’s where humans come in.
Over the past decade, campfires accounted for 6.2 per cent of fires, and resource management open fires, such as backyard and industrial burning, caused 7.2 per cent of wildfires.
Campfires caused six per cent of fires; yard burning, seven per cent.
BC Wildfire Service data
All the warnings about not tossing cigarette butts out car windows may be having an impact; only 0.9 per cent were smoking–related. Vehicle fires accounted for 3.1 per cent, railroads 1.1 per cent and electrical distribution 2.4 per cent.
Miscellaneous causes were behind 2.6 per cent of fires, including kids starting fires, fireworks, tiki torches, blasting, firearms, and camp stoves. Fires with undetermined causes or incomplete investigations were cited for 8.5 per cent of the total for the decade.
Some human-related causes are so rare they don’t turn up on the list; one fire in the Sooke area seven years ago was believed to have been sparked by a recreation vehicle dragging a chain that sent sparks flying into the undergrowth.
Conspiracy theories populate information vacuum
The BCWS is generally cautious about announcing a fire was caused by arson, fearing it may lead to copycat crimes. It can take weeks to investigate fires to find the true source, which itself can become a problem.
“There’s an information vacuum that occurs because the province doesn’t want to report on anything until they have the facts absolutely nailed down,” says wildfire ecologist Robert Gray, president of R.W. Gray Consulting Ltd in Chilliwack. “There’s that vacuum on Facebook, where things go completely off the rails, and rumours start.”
Some people see the words “human-caused” and jump to the conclusion the fires were caused by careless smokers, lazy campers, or arsonists. If arson is reported, others perceive political maneuverings, such as paid activists setting fires so they can “push their climate change agenda.”
“There’s that vacuum on Facebook, where things go completely off the rails, and rumours start.”
Robert Gray
In 2023, the worst wildfire year in Canadian history, conspiracy theories filled social media.
In June, Maxime Bernier, a former federal cabinet minister who now heads the People’s Party of Canada, posted on X: “Several arsonists have been arrested in the past weeks in different provinces for lighting forest fires. But the lying woke media and politicians keep repeating that global warming is the cause.”
Bernier posted a link to a story about John Cook, a man charged with 10 counts of arson after a string of fires around Cold Lake, Alberta. But, in fact, none of the stories about Cook say anything about a political motive.
Last August, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to deploy the military to help fight wildfires in B.C., the reaction on X was harsh.
“Why don’t you tell your WEF (World Economic Forum) buddies to stop setting fires,” said one commenter.
This April, firefighters were tackling a blaze threatening the community of Endako, west of Prince George. When BC Conservative leader John Rustad wrote a notice informing followers about it on his Facebook page, one commenter posted, “The globalist arsonists are starting early.”
On Vancouver Island, meanwhile, the large sign outside a boat-builder business in Sooke proclaimed the owner’s belief arson was behind forest fires.
In an online forum, a few commenters objected, but most praised the boat-builder.
At last, they said, someone was telling the truth.
Online content often ‘completely divorced from reality’
This June, academics at McGill University in Montreal and Carleton University in Ottawa documented the trend in a report entitled Flame Wars: Misinformation and Wildfire in Canada’s Climate Conversation.
Among the key findings, authors noted: “Online conversations began in May and surged in June 2023, with right-wing and anti-establishment groups posting and reposting content claiming the arsonists, not climate change, were responsible for the fires.”
The report adds, “…as Canada’s forests burned, false and misleading information surged into online conversations about the wildfires. References to lasers, drones, weather control, eco-terrorism, and state-driven arson circulated widely as people sought information on evacuation, support services, loved ones, and fellow residents. The chaos affected political leaders managing the crisis, firefighting, evacuation routes, media reporting, and, of course, people making hard decisions about their health and the safety of their communities.”
“…as Canada’s forests burned, false and misleading information surged into online conversations about the wildfires.”
Flame Wars: Misinformation and Wildfire in Canada’s Climate Conversation
Kevin Skrepnek, community and emergency services manager at the Thompson-Nicola Regional District in Kamloops, says in a written statement the Flame Wars report is an important document.
“It puts into words eloquently the angst that many in my industry have been feeling over the past few years – particularly the notion spread by bad actors online that governments are leveraging crisis as an opportunity to further some odious agenda.”
Skrepnek was on the front lines during the catastrophic wildfires of 2017 and 2018, at the time the two most destructive wildfire seasons in BC history. He is also a former chief fire information officer for the BC Wildfire Service.
In one week in July of 2017, 51,000 lightning strikes were recorded in B.C., and nearly 400 fires broke out, including 100 in one night. The B.C. government declared a state of emergency.
At the time, Skrepnek told the media, “I definitely shed a few tears that day.”
Now, as he reflects on his experience in emergency management, Skrepnek says there will always be legitimate concerns and criticisms regarding any natural disaster, “but the content being propagated online is often completely divorced from reality.
“We’ve seen this with a number of narratives that have taken root: the idea that arson is widely responsible for many wildfires (which is objectively not the case) or that evacuation orders are being utilized to remove people strategically to clear the way for some nebulous United Nations secret project.”
Arson isn’t increasing, but conspiracies about it are
Of course, there are arsonists at large, just as there are vandals, assassins, and random criminals.
On July 24, an arsonist set three fires in Nelson. The suspect was quickly apprehended before the fires did much damage.
But according to BC Wildfire data, arson is not increasing and it’s not responsible for most of the damage. What has changed in recent years is that more people are looking at arson through a political lens.
Robert Gray has spent his entire career studying wildfire behaviour on both sides of the Canada/U.S. border. First, as a student, then as a wildland firefighter, and now as a burn boss and wildfire ecologist.
He says in rural areas in the southeast US, “there were people who went and lit fires because they were going to get employment out of it. But, you know, we’ve kind of taken care of that here because we’ve got this professional firefighting force.”
Some arsonists, says Gray, are truly sick, or pyromaniacs, or politically motivated.
“I was solicited a number of years ago to do some work in Chile. And you know there were Indigenous people in Chile who were burning out corporate plantations.”
Arsonists were also being blamed for many of the catastrophic wildfires in Greece last year. Prolonged hot, dry weather created volatile conditions; some fires were blamed on arsonists who may have been landowners motivated by money “eager to clear protected forest land for development,” according to the New York Times.
But Gray is not aware of any cases in Canada where climate change activists set fires just to make the case that climate change was the cause, as online commentators allege.
Ironically, there is at least one convicted arsonist in Canada whose motives are clearly political. But he was on the other side of the climate change debate.
In Quebec, 38-year-old Brian Paré pleaded guilty in January to 13 counts of arson and one of arson with disregard for human life. He had been posting messages online claiming the government was setting fires to fool people into believing climate change is real.
Rural communities vulnerable to ‘fact-free’ echo chambers
Gray blames social media for amplifying anger and alienation.
“And when you really dig into it, people look for a tribe, there’s dissemination of information. And now our social media, especially Facebook, tend to form these echo chambers.
“You try to counter it, but it’s a fact-free environment.”
The best way to counter false claims, says Gray, is to continue to push the facts. But there are other challenges.
“You try to counter it, but it’s a fact-free environment.”
Bob Gray
Social media does give a voice to rural populations who often feel ignored, misunderstood by the government, and badly served by mainstream media. Gray believes there are bigger social forces at work. He cites a book called White Rural Rage published in the US this year that has become a bestseller.
The authors, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, note the opioid crisis, the closing of locally owned businesses and industries, the death of family farms, and the loss of rural hospitals.
“Rural America has suffered greatly in recent decades. Layered atop cultural resentments that are nearly as old as our country, this suffering has produced powerful antipathies that are aimed not just at certain groups of Americans, but often at the America democratic system itself.”
The authors conclude: “To many of the most cynical and malevolent characters in the political world, this is all part of the plan: Keep rural Americans bitter, and they’ll be an easily manipulated force of destruction when democracy doesn’t produce the proper results.”
Here in B.C., the polarization may not be as great, and the animosities less toxic, but some of the same trends are evident.
Building trust in a dangerous time
“We do sort of get the short end of the stick, right?” says Jilly Laviolette with the Wildfire Updates page in Port Hardy.
“Like the cities are where all the money pumps into all the infrastructure, all the hospitals, everything goes. So, anybody that’s in a rural area already struggles with the feeling like they’re not included in the province, because we just don’t see the same level of funding.”
That mistrust can be evident on the front lines of firefighting, as it was last year in the Shuswap. Some residents stayed put, defied evacuation orders, and fought the fires on their own; then they found evacuation blockades prevented them from restocking food and supplies.
“They need people to be allowed to go in with water pumps, they need to be allowed to have water tankers, they need to have fuel,” one resident, Darby Pollock, told the Vancouver Sun at the time.
Erick Thompson, a former reporter now working as communications manager for the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen, was there and remembers it vividly.
“There’s a hesitancy always during an evacuation order for some people to leave the area, and the reasons cited for that are various and diverse,” says Thompson. He was seconded to the wildfires in the Shuswap last year.
“Often people are hesitant to leave their property because they’re worried about their safety and security,” he says. They may feel better equipped than firefighters or the BC Wildfire Service to protect their homes.
“Often people are hesitant to leave their property because they’re worried about their safety and security.”
Erick Thompson
It all comes down to building trust, Thompson says, and that can take a long time.
“It’s not something that can be done easily. You really have to meet people where they’re at, have community meetings, and have conversations with individuals or groups who have concerns. And that’s really the best thing you can do, is to try and discuss what options are available and discuss, at a personal level, what the concerns are.”
Building trust. Sharing accurate information at a difficult and dangerous time. That’s what Laviolette and her fellow volunteers on northern Vancouver Island are trying to do with their BC Wildfire Updates site.
“It’s important for us to have verified, non-conspiracy, factual information,” she says. ” Because we’re talking about life and death, you know. People fleeing from their homes and their homes being burned down.”