It’s time to stop tiptoeing around wildfire fallout

Too soon?

Is it too soon to talk about the political fallout from the Fort McMurray fire?

You’d have to think not, given that the disaster happened one year ago. However, it might never be a good time to dissect the politics of the fire and its aftermath so long as it remains such an emotionally wrenching event.

Both the NDP government and the opposition parties, for example, seem reluctant to use the fire to score political points.

That might strike you as odd when you consider Wildrose Leader Brian Jean is not only one of Fort McMurray’s two MLAs but someone who lost his house to the fire.

He’d be within his rights to vent his frustration at the government.

It seems even odder when you look at this snippet from an exchange in the Alberta legislative assembly on May 3, 2016, where Jean is accusing Premier Rachel Notley of cutting the budget to fight forest fires.

Jean: “It’s clear that this government has made many mistakes, some even regarding fighting fires and leading up to this wildfire season. Will the premier today reverse these terrible decisions so we can make sure that our communities and Albertans are safe?”

Notley: “We are not interested in engaging in political grandstanding and fear mongering.”

This exchange is worth noting because it took place at 2 o’clock on May 3 — pretty much the exact time the fire began nibbling at the edges of Fort McMurray, forcing authorities to begin ordering residents to flee.

Notley’s dismissal of Jean’s concerns as “political grandstanding and fear mongering” was uncharacteristically arrogant, not to mention cringeworthy in hindsight.

But Jean hasn’t really played that up.

He questioned the government on Monday this week about a lack of water bombers in the air over Fort McMurray a year ago but he raised the issue on a day Notley wasn’t in the assembly. That tends to automatically take the issue down a notch.

The Wildrose did take a shot at the NDP on Wednesday when MLA David Hanson mentioned the fire’s anniversary — “Alberta and Fort McMurray will survive this tragic event, and we will even survive another two years of NDP government.”

Jean, though, was in Fort McMurray meeting with constituents and doing interviews with the news media where inevitably his lip quivered and his eyes welled with tears.

For a politician often viewed as stiff, Jean’s very human reaction to the fire’s aftermath reflects the frayed emotions of his own constituents.

If the Fort McMurray disaster offered us an opportunity to measure the character of our premier, it did the same for the leader of our official Opposition who, for a few days immediately after the disaster, lived in a tent rather than take up a space in an evacuation centre.

Notley, for her part, performed exceptionally well during the crisis.

Her public updates conducted daily, sometimes twice a day, to broadcast the latest news on the wildfire situation were masterful, personable and informative.

As one of the journalists plagued with spotty Internet and cellphone coverage while covering the fire, I would listen to Notley on the car radio to get an idea of the big picture, not just the narrow view I had of smoke and flames on the horizon.

Notley tends to downplay her role, just as Jean tends to tone down his criticism of the government.

Perhaps he’s afraid that by launching a bitter attack against the government for being unprepared, he’d inadvertently hit the local authorities and firefighters in Fort McMurray.

Conversely, because of the nature of Fort McMurray’s largest industry, the NDP is reluctant to use the fire as a cautionary tale about the impact of man-made climate change.

Nobody can say the fire was a direct result of climate change, but scientists warn us that climate change makes these kinds of community-killing infernos more and more likely.

Think back to the 2003 wildfire that destroyed 230 homes in Kelowna and the 2011 fire that destroyed one-third of Slave Lake as just two examples.

“These were not one-offs. It is not a fluke,” Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta, told Canadian Press this week. “It is going to happen again.”

Perhaps it’s time to start talking about the fallout from the greatest natural disaster in Canadian history, both political and environmental.