"Kenney is careful not to deny the reality of human induced climate change, but he downplays it. He is less a climate change denier and more a climate change dodger."

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announces a panel with a mandate to find a way to balancing the budget without raising taxes at the Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton, Alberta, on Tuesday, May 7, 2019. (Codie McLachlan/Star Edmonton)

Last week, when wildfires forced 5,000 people to flee their homes in and around the northern Alberta community of High Level, Premier Jason Kenney headed to Ontario on a business trip.

And then stayed there over the weekend to campaign with federal Conservatives.

No surprisingly, Kenney has since been lambasted by the NDP Opposition as a later-day Nero who fiddled while Alberta burned.

“Sticking around an extra two days to campaign for his buddies in the Conservative party when people were being evacuated from towns in northern Alberta doesn’t show leadership,” said NDP leader Rachel Notley. “He could be reaching out to people who have been dislocated, talking to them. They’d like to see their premier.”

The NDP is eager to compare Kenney’s out-of-the-office strategy to that of Notley who, as premier during the massive 2016 wildfire that destroyed parts of Fort McMurray, conducted twice-daily media conferences to update Albertans on the latest news.

Of course, the fire burning near High Level is nowhere near as voracious as the Fort McMurray fire, dubbed “The Beast,” that forced 88,000 people to flee while destroying 2,400 homes and buildings.

But the NDP argues the disturbing number of large forest fires the past decade in Alberta, including the 2011 fire that destroyed one-third of Slave Lake, is evidence that climate change is making wildfires more likely and more destructive.

It’s a position put forward by climate scientists.

But Kenney is apparently having none of it.

“There have always been forest fires,” he said on Monday. “Back before human contact there were forest fires that took millions of acres of forested land.”

It’s this kind of comment that has Kenney’s critics calling him a denier of man-made climate change.

But Kenney is careful in his wording.

“I accept the science on anthropogenic climate change and the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” said Kenney.

He says nobody can point to any one wildfire and say it’s the result of climate change — and on that point he is correct. He was also correct when he said on Monday that this year so far has been average when it comes to the area of forest burned by fires.

“In this particular instance I can tell you we’re on the five year average for forest fires in Alberta for wildfires and the large one right now (near High Level) is happening in an area where there has not been a fire for 80 years and so regardless of other factors it was due eventually for a large wildfire,” said Kenney.

Yes, but …

And there are plenty of “buts” when it comes to Kenney’s comments, according to Mike Flannigan, a wildfire expert at the University of Alberta.

“He’s got some things right and some things messed up a bit,” says Flannigan of Kenney. “It’s true if you stand any place in the boreal (forest) and you wait long enough, fire is going to happen, so that part’s true.”

Flannigan says Kenney was technically correct that on Monday the province was below the five-year average for area of forest burned. But that’s about to change quickly. “We haven’t exceeded (that average) but probably today or tomorrow we will because the fires are going like gangbusters right now, just gobbling up landscape like you wouldn’t believe.”

As Flannigan points out, Alberta’s wildfire season now starts in March, not April.

His conclusion: “It’s climate change in action, absolutely.”

Flannigan is not alone. His argument that climate change is a force multiplier making large, devastating fires more likely has long been supported by other scientists.

Federal research scientist Megan Kirchmeier-Young, for example, studied the devastating fires in BC in 2017 and concluded in a report early this year, “As the climate continues to warm, we can expect that costly extreme wildfire seasons — like 2017, in BC — will become more likely in the future. This will have increasing impacts on many sectors, including forest management, public health, and infrastructure.”

But if Kenney was to accept the science, he’d have to then explain what he’ll do about it. And that tends to take politicians down the road of carbon taxes and climate leadership plans — and Kenney just won a provincial election campaigning against both.

That’s why Kenney felt he could stay in Ontario and campaign with his federal Conservative friends. If he rushed home and headed up to High Level he’d be making the wildfire into something of a crisis rather than just another forest fire. And as Kenney argues, “there have always been forest fires.”

Even though he’s correct that nobody can definitively say any particular forest fire was a direct result of climate change. But there was a time when we had premiers, not just of the NDP ilk, who accepted the argument that climate change was making things worse.

In 2015, for example, BC’s then-premier Christy Clark toured devastated portions of her province with Prime Minister Harper and said, “Climate change has altered the terrain and it’s made us much more vulnerable to fire.” Even Harper had to admit, when asked by reporters if global warming was contributing to forest fire intensity, that, “I think it’s possible.”

Kenney is careful not to deny the reality of human induced climate change, but he downplays it. He is less a climate change denier and more a climate change dodger.

That’s why he felt he could campaign in Ontario when the forests were burning in Alberta.

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