The real story about Doug Ford and the northern Ontario wildfires isn’t the loud press conference he’s holding twice a day in Thunder Bay. It’s the 72 hours before anyone thought to bring him a microphone.
Let’s go back a couple of weeks. Namaygoosisagagun (also known as Collins) First Nation Chief Helen Paavola says she called the Ministry of Natural Resources for evacuation help before the fire destroyed her community on Monday, June 13. Nobody came. Whitesand First Nation ended up trying to protect its own infrastructure because, as the Chiefs of Ontario put it, there was “a lack of communication from government officials” about how to even declare a state of emergency. And residents of at least one evacuated community went back in against orders because they didn’t trust the province was committing enough to protect their homes in the first place.
None of that happened because Doug Ford was on a beach. It happened because his government still budgets for the fire season just finished, not for the fire next time. So Queen’s Park spent $271 million fighting fires last year and budgeted only $150 million this time.
That’s the actual crime here, and the charge is craven indifference to reality.
It’s the same crime John Vaillant diagnosed in Fire Weather, his account of the 2016 Fort McMurray inferno. Vaillant calls it the Lucretius Problem: authorities keep “basing their responses on outdated concepts, on what they’ve already seen, instead of what fire weather is capable of now. The data was there, but the interpretation wasn’t.” Ontario’s own natural resources minister, Mike Harris, admitted the Collins fire moved at four to eight kilometres an hour, a speed he called “unheard of.” Unheard of to him, maybe. But as Vaillant warned, the very nature of fire has changed. It moves faster, burns hotter and travels farther than it did when the current budget lines were drawn up, and a premier who wants credit for showing up Loud in Week Two and Three has to answer for why nobody showed up at all in Week One.
Being politically AWOL during a disaster may not have been a career-ending offence in years past, but now it is. Here are some examples, in ascending order of pain:
During COVID California governor Gavin Newsom dined maskless at the French Laundry restaurant while telling Californians to stay home, and that single dinner very nearly cost him the governorship in a recall.
Closer to home, Ford’s own finance minister, Rod Phillips, resigned within days of being caught vacationing in St. Barts while Ontarians were locked down for Christmas 2020.
On October 29, 2024, the regional president of Valencia, Spain, was having a four-hour lunch with a journalist while flash floods killed 229 people and he stayed out of the emergency command center until 7:30 p.m. He was heckled as a coward and murderer and resigned the next year.
During Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20, as bushfires raged across his country and two volunteer firefighters died, Prime Minister Scott Morrison quietly flew his family to Hawaii for a vacation. He lost the 2022 election thumpingly to current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Go back further and it gets worse. George W. Bush watched New Orleans drown from the window of Air Force One and told his FEMA director he was “doing a heck of a job,” a line that became shorthand for a presidency that never fully recovered its footing. FEMA director, Michael Brown, was gone within weeks, the first official casualty of Katrina. And Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, blamed for the slow evacuation order that preceded it, never ran for re-election.
Every one of those people eventually showed up, gave the press conference, said the right words, the same way Doug Ford is doing now. But it didn’t matter. What people remembered was where they were and what they weren’t doing while the thing was actually happening.
This is where Vaillant’s other point lands hardest. He argues our fear of fire hasn’t caught up to what fire has become, and neither has our forgiveness. For decades, Ontarians shrugged off a bad fire season the way you shrug off a bad flu season: annual, unfortunate, nobody’s fault.
But that deal is off. When the smoke reaches the White House lawn and a First Nations chief says she begged for help and got none, the public doesn’t file it under weather. It files it under negligence, and it reacts with the ferocity of the thing that scared it.
Doug Ford is a fast learner about optics. He sold the jet in 48 hours and he’s holding two pressers a day in Thunder Bay right now. But optics only work on stories that are still being written as this is. Last week, the New York Times noted that half of the 900 wildfires burning right now across Canada are impossible to put out because they are far from any road. So they’re allowed to just burn out.
This story already has a first chapter, and it was written before Doug Ford arrived.
He should ask himself which version of last week Ontario is going to remember: the one where he thundered from a podium, or the one where an Indigenous chief called for help and nobody came.
Meanwhile…
1. What are the wildfires costing? “When monetized,” a group of Stanford and Princeton economists wrote in Nature last year, in the first major study on the topic, “the climate-driven smoke deaths result in economic damages that exceed existing estimates of climate-driven damages from all other causes combined in the U.S.A.”
Plus the real reason for the fires.
2. Some odd raps about men. Eat, drink and beat Mary. Can men get pregnant? Why one man can’t get no respect. And what’s all this about testosterone? Really, Pete? And Thom Browne answers your dress code questions.
3. Fame and fortunes. Of the 50 highest paid creators in the world, I’ve heard of exactly none of them. And no matter how much I look at this, I still can’t do any of it. And every image in this film is real. And what the Middle Ages can teach us about burnout. And inside China’s great game in the Arctic. Finally, what Emirates CEO thinks of the new jets Boeing just delivered: “Send them back. They’re only fit for baked bean tins.”
4. Shape-shifting AI. What else sets it apart from real writing? And how can former U.S. Presidents sing from the same songbook?
5. What do you call the irrational fear of jewelry? Kosmemophobia00162-8/abstract?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email). Fear that somewhere a duck is watching you? Anatidaephobia. Fear of long words? Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. And fear of happiness? Cherophobia.
And where the design beats the view.
6. High notes. First, Sam Neill’s last words. Jessye Norman sings Dido’s Lament.
Plus, the pursuit of the Abominable Snowman. And of course, Sweet Sue, Just You. And speaking of sour notes, the scandal at the Boston Symphony keeps growing. And Canada beat Norway! Not in soccer, but in life!
7. Tax the rich? A growing number of U.S. cities and states want to impose The Overpaid CEO Tax. New York Mayor Zhoran Mamdani campaigned (and some say won office) on the idea. Some billionaires think the tax idea is okay. But most…well, “it will only hurt the rest of us.”…and even people who aren’t billionaires, but have a bit of money. are against it.
Speaking of taxes, here’s Paul Krigman on Trump’s latest temper tantrum.
8. Now here’s a sponsorship idea. How a really bad soccer team scored big sponsorships. Speaking of…the CBC must have found some new money because it’s adding five new foreign bureaus to its news team. About time. About money, too. But it’s the first piece out of our public broadcaster in eons. Onward.
Speaking of a problem redefined is a problem half-solved, try this if time zones flummox you. Finally, how to feed your dog.
9. What kind of English do you speak? Say just five words and this map will pinpoint where you’re from in North America. It turns out Matt Forest is a map nerd who’s created a College Football Fan Map, an Objects Orbiting the Earth Map, AI and Wildfire Maps, and a Map That Starts Where Google Maps Stops.
10. The Trebek Initiative. It’s the joint National Geographic-Canadian Geographic research program for environmental researchers, scientists and storytellers named after Alex Trebek, the Sudbury-born game show host who helmed Jeopardy for 37 consecutive years, and who was a huge Nat Geo-Can Geo fan. Here are its 2026 grantees.
11. What I’m enthusing. I told you about The Secret Chord, the fantastic 90-minute pastiche of Leonard Cohen’s song. In fact, I loved it so much I took Jean to see it again this week. Nothing beats wretched excess. One of the singers is the divine Divine Brown. She also created another Soulpepper Production, Revolutionary Women in Blues, starring Brown, plus Sate and
Joanna Majoko. It opens on Aug. 13 and you can get tickets here.
Also, and truly finally, the splendid retrospective show at the AGO on Newfoundland artist David Blackwood is only open through July 26. It’s worth making a special effort this weekend to see it.
Guaranteed 100% written by Bob Ramsay, human.