Dear Editor:
With the forest fire smoke blanketing southern Ontario over the past weeks, no one can ignore the fact of the out-of-control wildfires burning in northern Ontario and Quebec.
This is an appropriate time, then, to remind Ontarians that Premier Doug Ford, in 2019, cut Ontario’s Emergency Forest Firefighting budget by 67%. Funding was cut from $212 million to $69.8 million.
This was the same budget that cut funding for flood preparedness by 48%.
This first Ford budget, titled “Protecting What Matters,” focused on protecting jobs and getting money into the pockets of Ontarians.
But at what cost? What, exactly, was being protected, and what was put at risk? We knew in 2019 that the costs of extreme weather from climate change were on the rise.
This year’s budget allocated $135 million for Emergency Forest Firefighting, while the actual cost in 2021 was $237 million. There is no doubt that firefighting and saving our forests is underfunded.
Ford’s cuts were a failure to prepare for the fires that we knew would become more common and more dangerous.
Jan Beveridge,
Elora