This article was written by Steve McKinley and was published in the Toronto Star on July 7, 2023.

An extraordinary wildfire season has created a record-breaking number of evacuees across Canada, federal officials said during a briefing on the national wildfire situation Thursday.

And with wildfire season increasing in length and severity — thanks in part to climate change — that situation will only become more dire as the year goes on.

The unprecedented scale of this season’s fires — driven largely by high temperatures and droughtlike conditions in many areas — has prompted an estimated 155,856 Canadians across the country to flee their homes, as a result of 132 evacuation orders.

That’s about 1.5 times more evacuees than in 2016, when the Fort McMurray fire represented the previous high over the past 40 years. Of those who have evacuated this year, more than 4,500 are still under evacuation orders; 3,400 of those are from First Nations communities.

And Natural Resources Canada officials are predicting the fire situation will be getting worse before it gets better.

“It’s no understatement to say that the 2023 fire season is and will continue to be record-breaking in a number of ways,” said Michael Norton, director general of the Northern Forestry Centre, Canadian Forest Service.

He said that in addition to the record number of evacuees, the total area burned by wildfires so far this year exceeds the previous total for any entire season since Natural Resources started keeping records. And those fires are being fought with the aid of more international firefighters from more countries than Canada has previously seen.

“And we are only approximately halfway through the fire season,” Norton said.

Meteorologists and fire researchers are predicting a tough summer ahead.

“What we’re seeing in the West is an ongoing drought from 2022, which tended to intensify during the latter part of the summer in 2022,” said CFS fire research analyst Richard Carr. “And that carried on through the winter in a lot of areas and then it spread eastwards over 2023.”

“Right now, we’ve got various drought levels stretching right from coast to coast. There’s some drought in pretty much every province and territory in the country at the moment — the most intense areas are in central British Columbia, and southern Alberta.”

Those drought conditions will combine with projections for “some very extreme or anomalous heat” in B.C., Yukon, N.W.T. and the western parts of Nunavut as well as portions of Quebec, said Environment Canada warning preparedness meteorologist Armel Castellan.

With more of the same hot and dry weather predicted in store for most of the country, Natural Resources is projecting increased wildfire risk in July from B.C. and the Yukon across the country to western Labrador. In August, that area of increased risk will decrease slightly but the areas of greatest risk will still stretch from B.C. to western Quebec.

On June 27, with three months left in the wildfire season, Canada surpassed its historic record for total area burned by wildfires. That previous seasonal mark was set in 1989, when 7.6 million hectares were burned.

As of Wednesday, 8.8 million hectares have been scorched this year, nearly 11 times the 10-year average for this time of year, Norton said. Also by Wednesday, 3,412 fires had been recorded across Canada; 639 of those are active, with 351 of those deemed “out of control.”