A Canadian man who claimed forest fires were the result of a government conspiracy has pleaded guilty to lighting more than a dozen blazes during the country’s record-breaking wildfire season, as nearly 100 fires persist in drought-stricken regions.
Brian Paré admitted to 13 counts of arson and one count of arson with disregard for human life at the courthouse in central Quebec, an act that drew away key firefighting resources from nearly 700 fires in the province last summer.
Those blazes, which required the aid of international fire crews, charred more than 4.5m hectares of boreal landscape. Virtually all of those fires were caused by lightning strikes, the Quebec’s fire service says.
But at the courthouse in the town of Chibougamau, prosecutor Marie-Philippe Charron said on Monday two of the 14 fires lit by Paré forced the evacuation of 500 homes, the Canadian Press reported. The largest fire lit by Paré consumed nearly 873 hectares of forest.
Fire officials investigated a string of five blazes in June that had no possible natural cause and broke out days after the province had implemented a fire ban. The 38-year-old Paré quickly became a suspect when he was spotted in the location of the fires and “demonstrated a certain interest in fires” after an interview with police, said Charron.
In June police began watching his social media posts, which frequently focused on the province’s wildfires. He shared content suggesting the record-breaking fire season was the result of government intervention, not climate change. The prosecution said police specialists developed a suspect profile based on the fires – and increasingly, Paré’s seemed a match.
Police later obtained a warrant to install a tracking device on Paré’s vehicle and found he travelled to locations where other fires were started.
After he was arrested in September, he admitted to starting nine fires and “claimed he was doing tests to find out whether the forest was really dry or not”, Charron told the court.
Despite a string of conspiratorial theories over the summer, amplified by Alberta’s premier, nearly all of Canada’s fires were caused by lightning striking the tinder-like condition of forests.
In its last report of 2023, the Canadian interagency fire centre said 6,551 fires burned 18,496,057 hectares of land, compared with 1,467,976 hectares burned the year prior.
Even now, more than 100 wildfires are still burning in British Columbia. An extreme drought in the autumn and a dry winter with unseasonably warm temperatures has done little to tamp down the blazes. The BC Wildfire Service said the average figure for January is two dozen fires.
Of concern for officials is the nature of winter fires, which tend to produce little smoke and instead smolder underground
“It’s not necessarily that they’re out-of-control and moving and growing. It’s just how deep some of these fires burned and the size of them,” Forrest Tower, a spokesperson for the province’s wildfire service, told the Canadian Press. “It takes a ton of manual labour to dig deep enough or to access some of these more remote fires.”
