Firefighter Noah Freedman spent the summer of 2025 working through a warm season in Ontario’s wilderness. He describes it as “modestly busy” with nearly 600,000 hectares burned — an area about the size of nine Torontos.
While there are many variables firefighters need to be prepared for, there’s a predictable element that Freedman says consistently fails to be anticipated: funding. For at least the past 10 years, the province has underbudgeted for firefighting, sometimes spending twice what it planned.
In 2025’s budget, Ontario allotted $135 million for its Emergency Forest Firefighting fund, which Freedman describes as money that “keeps the lights on.” The province ended up spending double that: $271 million, according to this year’s budget. But that same document penciled in just $150 million again for this year.
The province did not respond to requests from Canada’s National Observer asking why the budget hasn’t been increased.
Not allotting adequate funds translates to real impacts on the frontlines, said Freedman, who is also vice president of Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 703. He said last season was “riddled with logistical problems” due to a lack of available funding: not having crews and helicopters where they were needed, and scrambling to request more as wildfire conditions worsened.
“None of that is because of our leadership in our agency. It's really a result of just not getting anywhere near the funding that we need to truly be decision-makers,” Freedman said.
Freedman said the lack of up-front funding “doesn't allow us to do things preemptively.” A crew might have one helicopter to service a large area, and “as soon as you get more fires, like more than one at a time, you can't do anything about it,” he says.
“We can think all we want, and we can plan all we want, but we have to wait for additional funding when it inevitably runs out very quickly. When things start happening, we delay resource acquisition,” Freedman said.
Meanwhile, climate change — caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels — continues to create hot, dry conditions that make wildfires more intense and frequent. As of June 1, Ontario already has more than a dozen active wildfires, including a new one burning out of control south of Timmins that has already grown to 350 hectares.
Last year’s season saw 643 fires totalling nearly 600,000 hectares burned, compared to the previous year when 475 fires burned 90,000 hectares, which Freedman described as a slow season. Even then, the province spent $171 million — $30 million more than what’s budgeted this year. The 10-year average in the province is 694 fires at about 200,000 hectares burned.
“You end up in a situation where we're like, ‘Well, we can't go get that fire.’ And you're like, ‘But why?’ Well, because we don't have a helicopter,” he said.
Last year’s fires prompted temporary evacuations of thousands of residents, including in Sandy Lake and Deer Lake First Nations. Across the country, 80 per cent of majority-Indigenous communities are in fire-prone regions, and Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner says that’s context the Ford government is missing. Not only do First Nations communities deal with a disproportionate number of evacuations, but also “poor air quality and limited resources to protect their lives, livelihoods and property,” he said.
“Wildland firefighters are clear that baseline funding is vital to the advance planning needed to be properly prepared for fire season. The Ford government’s failure to provide it threatens safety for people and communities,” said Schreiner.
Liberal MPP Ted Hsu describes the funding discrepancy as a “a long-standing problem with the government’s budgets.”
“They routinely underbudget, and it would be far more transparent and effective if they realistically budgeted for the cost of wildland fires, as the costs to fight them continue to grow,” he said.
Especially as the Ford government takes on ambitious and expensive projects, notably in Toronto, Freedman says there should be space to enable fire crews in Ontario to be more prepared for wildfire season.
“If we took, let's say, $3 billion and didn't put it into a brand new convention centre, that's 12 years of funding to a $250-million fire service,” he said.
“Which is still less than what we spend every year.”