All right. Welcome back to the Ottawa studios inside my canoe head today. We are going to talk about the Northwest Territories fires and evacuation and what this means to you as a case study. So sit back, grab yourself your favorite beverage.
Let's get at it. All right. Thanks again for joining us this weekend inside my canoe head and I just want to start off with thanking everyone. The launch episode of season eight was the single greatest download day in the history of this podcast.
We've been at this almost three and a half years providing free emergency preparedness education to the public at large. And that was our breakout day. I can't thank you enough. It's humbling, but I know the message is getting out there.
I know we're making a difference in lives, your comments, your suggestions, keep them coming at Jeff at preparedness labs dot CA. Drop over to inside my canoe head dot CA that contest is still running for if you drop down there and sign up for the newsletter that is there by Thursday's episode. We are going to pick a winner and provide you a free copy of the book that is available on the same website as well over a preparedness last week. We have our newsletter for that purpose as well.
Both of them will be restarting this week after a couple of week hiatus for giving everyone some wonderful family time during the summer. So today we want to talk about case studies. We promise this as a feature on this podcast going into season eight. So we're going to do a deep dive into the Northwest Territories.
Hopefully you'll be a bit of understanding of what it is the kind of fire season they've had, what their evacuations look for, the political context in which they evict, and then how does this influence your plan for evacuation at home? Because remember, it is one of the trifecta of plans you must have if you want to consider yourself a prepared individual. It doesn't matter whether you're renting a flat a room or sleeping on somebody's couch. Every human being requires an evacuation plan in today's chaotic world.
And so we'll begin today with the Northwest Territories, a bit of a descriptor. As we say in the Army, ground dictates everything. And that means to truly understand and provide any type of commentary whatsoever on a geographical region. You have to understand the ground and the ground dictates because the ground not only covers the terrain, but the ground covers the population, the roots, the ground covers the ground.
The distribution, the industries, the economics, the political, everything about the territory informs the evacuation policy. It informs the people. It informs the demographics. So simply saying, I need to look at the roots to understand how to evacuate means you will miss a huge part of the story.
And I have to preface my comments by saying, I've never been there. The North is the one part of Canada and the only part of Canada that I have yet to have the privilege to visit. I will be heading to the Yukon in 2024 to conduct a three week back country paddling adventure on the Snake River. And the following year in 2025, I want to do a deep dive into the back bush of the Northwest Territories.
But, you know, time is what it is. And I haven't had the privilege yet of visiting. So let's dive into the statistics that make the Northwest Territories tick. So from a greater perspective, it's about 1.14 million square kilometers.
Some, you know, Wikipedia for what it's worth says it's roughly if you combine France, Spain and Portugal together, that would be the size of the territory. There's about 46,000 people. Only one city, a handful, maybe seven or eight major communities. And then you have a number of smaller communities as small as 36 people by the latest census.
But you have one city's now 37% of the population is indigenous, 11% inuit and 52 of some type of European descent. There are 11 official languages in the Northwest Territories, nine of them are indigenous. And then you have the two standard Canadian French and English. However, 78% of the population surveyed in the most recent census will tell you that their mother tongue is English.
Now, from an industrial perspective, the Northwest Territories main industry is mining and natural resource extraction with BP oil and Rio Tinto diamonds being the leading industries. There are some other smaller players, but the Northwest Territories have had a history of mining throughout the history of Canada from copper to silver to as a unique little fact, the Uranium for the Manhattan Project came out of the Northwest Territories for all you Oppenheimer fans out there. But really other than tourism, which is huge for those that venture into the North and the Nahani River is the river system that is most famous with Victoria Falls and where I intend to visit in 2025 after I get the Yukon off of the paddling bucket list, it really is not that more populous or a huge GDP economic engine in the North. Needless to say, it is a vast area of undeveloped Arctic Tundra and Northern boreal forest that is split about 5050.
Now, Northwest Territories, when I was younger, used to be far more massive up until April 1st of 1999, when through a Inuit land claims, Nunavut was formed and Nunavut became Canada's third territory and took most of the Eastern and Northern portions of Northwest Territories into a separate and distinct territory. So Northwest Territories is now the second largest in landmass, the most largest in populous with only 46,000 people. So you can imagine that something the size of France, Portugal and Spain put together for my European friends with only 46,000 people in it and a handful of communities. So that just goes to tell you how vast and crazy it is when we talk about wildfires, etc.
Now, from a political perspective, they have a unique government that if you are a political animal, it really is worthy. And I've studied this in the past and I think it's a phenomenal way they run government in the Northwest Territories. It's distinct from the other Territories. It's a consensus government.
There are no political parties. All the members of the territorial government assembly are elected every year as independents. Nobody's attached to a party. Everybody is elected as an independent.
When they all show up, they have a secret ballot for who's going to become the premier, the head of the territory, and vote their speaker in by secret ballot. And then seven MLAs are chosen as cabinet ministers by consensus, which leads to a much higher degree of communications between the cabinet and the general assembly. And because everything flows through like it normally does through ministerial committees, to the ministers, to the cabinet to be enacted abroad into law, you have a much higher degree. And when you rule by consensus, that means you don't rule by ballot.
You rule by everybody agreeing and coming to wonderful compromise. So, yeah, it's only 46,000 people, but it's the size of Western Europe. And they're able to run that diverse government with 11 languages through consensus. I'm telling you, for all of you out there that don't think it can be done and that you need political parties to advance agendas, I'm telling you, there is a government system that will tell you otherwise.
Now, with that political power comes a bit of a problem when it comes to their effective representation in Canada as a larger entity. They only have one seat in our House of Commons federally. So there's 338 seats in the federal government. One of them comes from the Northwest Territories.
So you could argue successfully that they are politically irrelevant on the national stage. Now, people won't say that out. That is politically incorrect opinion. But in reality, never in the history of Canada has an election in the Northwest Territories been consequential in any way, shape, or form.
And on top of that, because we have an appointed Senate, they have one. Let me say that again. There are 105 senators in Canada. One comes from the Northwest Territories.
So you can understand the lack of political leverage that exists in the Northwest Territories. Why is that important? Well, right now, finally, the media is paying attention to the government of the Northwest Territories. As a direct result of the fact that it's on fire.
This is the worst fire season in 30 years in Canada. For the last 30 years, the wildfires, the swath of the territory, the totality of hectares burned has been on a steady downward spiral. This year has been a statistical anomaly and has, because of that, brought out a great number of underlying issues that otherwise would have been ignored by the government in Ottawa. Irrespective of the political party, the Northwest Territories has been collectively ignored.
The North has been ignored for many, many years. It doesn't even get a prominent voice in our military defense policy, which is a completely different podcast episode about the fact that we have no clue who's running around underneath the ice or even on top of the ice in Northern Canada, because we don't have the ability to surveil it. But that is a different discussion altogether. But the Northwest Territories being that lack of it have not seen there, you would argue, their share of investment.
Now, you can look at shares of investment as a percentage of per capita income or need and dependability. When you look at the Northwest Territories, there's only one principal main road into Yellowknife. We're going to get to the details of that when we talk about evacuation shortly. But it is a one lane in each direction road that has very few if scant services along the way to support either industry or to support an evacuation on the less or the population.
So the Northwest Territories has been clamoring and arguing, nobody's been paying any attention, obviously, because politically irrelevant or place. And the media could care less until there's fires burning. They've been arguing for decades. If you look back, they've been arguing for decades for significant additional, outside non-population related infrastructure.
infrastructure investment into the Territories. Because the Territories, they have 46,000 people. They don't have the economic GDP base and the taxation base to raise the necessary funds. When you think about it, the average double-laning of a highway costs about a little over a million dollars a kilometer.
I know it sounds a bit crazy, but that's basically what it does. For every kilometer of 20 highway you want to build, you're into it about a million, and it's probably with inflation growing higher than that. So if you've got 1,400,000,000 kilometers worth of road that needs to be twinned, that's a 1.4 billion dollar singular road project that less than 100,000 people will drive on at any given year. That's not going to win you a political seat, right?
You can spend 1.4 billion dollars far better to get more political hay for your money elsewhere in Canada. So that just goes to tell you the difficulty and the challenge faced by Northern Canada. It's not distinct to the Northwest Territories, it is quite common with other Territories within Canada. But that just goes to tell you.
Now to talk about the fires. Now, there have been 277 fires this year of which 36 are currently declared out. 241 are active, all are under monitoring, and quite a number of them, however, are currently no threat to a population center or a critical communications route, and therefore it is worthy to just let the suckers burn, right? So if you want to follow the individual fire by fire size by size, go to the government website of the Northwest Territories, gov.nt.ca.
All the information is there, the link to their public safety pages there. And when you go there, there are five distinct regions in the Northwest Territories, the Decho, South Slave, North Slave, Satu, and Beaufort Delta regions. And in each of those five regions, you will have a breakdown of not only fire risk, but the name, and sometimes it's a number, sometimes it's a name assigned to a fire. The total hectares burn the size, the threat profiles, and the current plan of attack from the government on those fires.
So you will see things like this fire will be hit by water bombers tonight as of 26 August. So for the population, there is a very, very detailed piece of information where you can see what is burning, where it's burning, what the threat is, and what the government is currently doing to attack those fires. The emergency management organization of the government of the territories is an effective, robust, well-trained, and professional group of individuals. They are doing an exceptional job.
They have obviously asked for a top level of resources from the federal government, including a couple hundred members of the Canadian Armed Forces to help with the firefighting effort. Supporting agreements from the other territories and provinces are in, but they are in well control. They are not in need of any, the government can't come in and rescue them anyhow. If you understand how emergency management works in Canada, the provinces are the primary level of government.
They run the emergency response and the emergency recovery, and any assets that are provided by the federal government or neighboring provinces or territories are subordinated to the government. So the members of the Canadian Armed Forces that are deployed to the Northwest Territory are subordinated to the government of the Northwest Territory. So basically the military doesn't go in there and start doing its thing, right? It goes in there and it executes the task for which it's told by the Northwest Territories government.
Now this is all arranged, but the point being I want to make crystal clear that the government of Northwest Territories is handling this emergency. There are professionals. They know what they're doing. They're well-trained, and they have the support from rest of Canada.
It is just a one-in-31-year massive fire outbreak event, and they are in command and control. Now at this point, Yellowknife Hay River, Fort Smith, and the surrounding areas are currently under evacuation order. This represents over 50% of the population of the entire territory has been ordered to evacuation. I'll give you an example of a current evacuation order for the small town of Hay River.
It reads, there is an active fire threat in the community of Hay River. All persons, including essential workers in the Hay River area, need to go to the Hay River, Merlin, Carter Airport, and await further instructions. Anyone who remains in Hay River is doing so at their own risk. There will be no emergency services or response available.
And listen to that last part, because this is key, because if you follow us here at Inside My Canoe Head on social media, over on Instagram, I posted something on Friday about should the government have the power to order mandatory evacuations? Not whether you think they're a good idea, but should they even possess that power? Well, for us, it's gone viral. There are hundreds and hundreds of comments on there.
Mainly, I think, from Canada and the United States of America, there's a couple from Europe you can tell by the language, but they're all very, very virulently, and some of them are in polite, but welcome to social media. There's a lot of people having a good conversation there as to about mandatory evacuations, but the key, and I put it in the question, is that if you choose not to respond to a mandatory evacuation, the likelihood of the police are going to grab you out of your home and drag you kicking and screaming. They've got better things to do, but you're going to be left behind. And then emergency services are not going to come rescue you.
So that opens another huge description, another huge discussion as to whether that should be, but just to give you an idea of yellow knife being evacuated, imagine the capital city of your country completely, or your province being completely evacuated. Now, the one single road route out of yellow knife to Edmonton, which is the largest support center, now a lot of the evacuees are being distributed and being supported wonderfully by the government of Alberta, and they need kudos for that. It's 14 and a half hours at full speed with limited resources on route. Think about that.
It's a 14 and a half hour drive if you can go 100 kilometers an hour. That's how long your evacuation route is with next to no services on route. Think about that. For my American friends, that's like living in Washington, D.C., and being told your evacuation center is Orlando, and you can't get off the highway.
Have a good time. Or for my friends in Europe, that's like living in Copenhagen, and being told that your evacuation center is Paris, France. Go. And you can't stop on route because there's nothing on route for you to talk about.
So those evacuations are being seen, and I'm not going to go into the media coverage because it's ridiculous. It's horrible. It just makes my head shake, and this is totally separate and distinct from the meta question as to Canadian news on Facebook. We're going to leave that aside, but the news coverage is sensational.
It's ideological and politically driven. Unfortunately, they've lost, for the large part in Canada, the ability to provide a notable, important, and valuable narrative about the evacuations. It's all about clickbait, hit pieces, and ideological narrative. So setting that aside, what does this do?
Now understanding what I just talked about these small communities, like, Hey, River, the only way to get out of Hey, River is to fly. That's it. You're not driving out of Hey, River. You're flying out of Hey, River.
So we evacuate Hey, River. As you do now, it's got to go out by air. If the smoke is in the wrong direction, you can't get out by air. Who has to get them out by air?
These are the unique capacities of the Royal Canadian Air Force and some civilian airlines that have been used to support. This is the fantastic. But what does evacuate? What does this teach us about evacuations?
The number one thing is, as we say here at Inside Mike Newhead and contained in our book, Prepared and Simplified Book 1 available on Amazon, and everywhere evacuations require preparation. That is why it is part of your trifecta of plans every prepared individual must have. And probably, and we label it as the most dangerous event that could happen for a family or an individual. And that's why it is critical to have an evacuation plan for you and your family.
The first and foremost part of this is understanding that it is your responsibility to evacuate you and your family. It is not the government's job to get you out. The reason that's important is, unless you live in someplace like Hey, River, it's your responsibility to develop that evacuation plan. It's not the government.
So when you understand that, the first place issue has to have the destination. Where are you going to go when you evacuate? Don't wait for the government to tell you where your evacuation center is. You don't want to go, trust me.
You don't want to go to one of these public shelters if you can avoid it. Because while it's warm, it has a washroom and they will feed you there. You're about 200 cots in a hockey arena and there's no privacy whatsoever. That is not a place to go through a stressful and difficult time.
Now, if you have no other choice there, you go, but have a destination. Now, for that destination, you have to have two routes and two methods to get there and two modes of travel. The reason being is if you have a singular route like a road route out of Yellow Knife, you have an air route. So those are two routes out.
You also have you could go by boat depending on the time of year on a great slave lake. So you have to understand the location of where you've chosen to live. Again, if you're over 18 and you're adult and you live in a democratic nation, you've made the logical and intelligent or otherwise choice delivery you do. So you've chosen to live in this location.
You have a responsibility to understand your options for evacuating that location. The key to evacuation, and I said this on a recent interview, I had the privilege on a matter of fax podcast, which is coming out shortly. I flew down to Halifax to be a guest on that podcast to talk about emergency preparedness and evacuations because of all of the issues they're having in my home province of Nova Scotia. That was an absolute privilege.
And I talked about the fact that a key to successful evacuation, number one, is to leave early. Whenever there's a recommendation that people should prepare for an evacuation, I'd leave. And I always recommend to clients we work with in the business world, to families and individuals that I contract with, provide preparedness education. It is very, very simple.
Leave early. Leave before anyone else does. Because if you look at the design of modern transportation systems, they are not designed to house the entire population. They can't handle that level of people being dumped on the route in one shot.
They just can't. They're not designed that way. If you look at your neighborhood within a city, they're all these cute little turning, nice cul-de-sac roads. And then there are very few access to the main arterial roads because you want to keep neighborhoods hidden away, quiet, calm, et cetera.
Until you give a mandatory evacuation, and that's when everybody decides to go. What happens? Everybody jumps on the route at the same damn time. Now all of a sudden you can't get out of your neighborhood, let alone get an arterial road.
If you've seen the pictures from the roads of evacuation where you see kilometers line of vehicle, this is not a shot against the Northwest Territories. They have no choice right now because of the singular route. That is a failure in an evacuation. When you have long lines of cars jammed out route, that is a government and operational failure.
And I will be an outlier in this industry to call it what it is, right? There is an entire way to do large-scale movement of vehicles and equipment down roads, and it is not done by throwing everybody on the damn road, telling them to get out and wishing them the best of luck. There is everything from mobile repair teams to mobile fuel teams to commodity points for food and water, mobile medical teams. All of these things need to be up running and in place before you order these mandatory evacuations.
That's going to be a separate article in our journal that's coming out in November at a preparedness labs incorporated. We're going to put an article together about how to properly manage an ongoing evacuation. But the point being, because of that, because right now governments don't do evacuations on roads well at all, I wouldn't call it a failure because people get out. But I don't think there could be a worse way to do it.
You're on your own. And you just look at those road routes and you listen to talk about people who have no water and nobody's distributing fuel and they can't get any information. Okay, you're on your own. So what does that mean?
Leave early, know your location risks and all of the risks that may exist on route and go before everybody else. Otherwise you're going to be in a freaking log jam and it won't be fun, right? When you've got to figure out what to take. And this is a big debate.
There's lots of cool people looking for their five minutes of fame on TV, trying to give you a list of things to take. It's very, very simple. From a personal perspective, you have to reflect on what is priceless. Every time you evacuate your home, you're evacuating it with the assumption that there's a possibility it will not be there when you return and everything in it will be gone.
You can't take everything. So what is truly, truly priceless? You need to identify that and make a list of it ahead of time because when the world goes pear-shaped and things start to get stressful, you forget things. It's natural human.
And we're not going to run weekly evacuation rehearsals where you're going to grab everything and jump in the car and drive around the city block and come back. That's not what we're talking about. If you make a simple list and print it out and put it in a prominent place in your home where you know where it is, and it contains the list of things that you believe that you've come up with in times of peace and calm, which is when evacuation planning should all be done. They call it blue sky planning at FEMA because it's all about planning when the sky's blue and nothing's wrong, which is a great analogy.
I think it's fabulous. You make this list of things that are important to you, right? So you know what to grab. And again, if you're executing your evacuation plan early, you're not under a significant time crunch.
You're not running around like a chicken with your head caught off screaming and yelling and kids and things are running around in your barking orders. That's not what the world looks like when you prepare and you execute an early evacuation. So what is Brightless? In reality, what can't you replace with money?
You got to figure out what that is and you got to figure out how you're going to transport it. And if you can't fit it all in, you haven't really asked that question appropriately. What is priceless? And then the other thing is you have to think about what we talk about here inside my canoe head.
Your animalistic requirements of food water, shelter, health, safety, and security, and you are going to have to be able to provide that to you and the ones you're responsible for throughout the evacuation from start to finish. Which means if you're gone that highway from Yellowknife, you have to depart Yellowknife with at least what you believe you will need to cover all of your families' needs, including fuel and communications when you leave. So if you're not in Yellowknife, but you happen to be in somewhere else in Europe or in a community in the United States, which by the way, I want to take this show out to thank all of my listeners in the United States. You are the fastest growing group of folks.
I've said it on the previous episode. I'll say it again. I'd shoot some some interesting dirt with some soldiers around the world from the good United States of America. Scared to death by a couple of Marines, whatever.
But the point is, is that I really appreciate it. So you think about being in a small town in the United States of America and you have to evacuate. You know who you are, you know your location, you know your risks, you know who you're taking, you've made a plan, you've got to go early, you know your alternate routes in the different modes of transportation, and you know where you're going to get. You know your destination, and you know what's at your destination.
So the point being is you have to be able to take care of every part of that entire process and evolution, that entire program. You have to personally and solely without external help, you have to be able to support that yourself. Which is why evacuation planning is a pretty detailed, and we have a separate episode from last season on conducting an evacuation and an evacuation plan. You have to walk through all of the things that could possibly go wrong to you on the evacuation route and how you intend to deal with them.
And then the number one thing about having that destination, I'm going to return to this as we close out the conversation on evacuations, is that destination better not be Motel 6 in the neighboring town. Because think about it, if there's a possibility you may not be able to return to your home. Do you want to be in a Motel 6 eating takeout food for the next two weeks, paying those exorbitant bills, trying to fight and use hotel Wi-Fi or the limited data that you have ability to try to figure out what you and your family does next as you're all stuffed into one hotel room? My friends, that is not a recipe for good mental health.
Your job is to find friends or family that are far enough distance away that they are likely not to be affected by whatever calamity has caused you injury, a place that you can go, a comfortable basement, a place where you can crash, where you can have a cold beverage, where you can use your home. You can use somebody else's Wi-Fi and internet. You can have a hot shower. Everybody's got a bit of space.
And you can, to the greatest extent possible, bring the anxiety and stress level down from its exponential level, especially if you've lost or may lose your home and everything in it at the time. And if this is going to be a couple of week decision, where before you have to now move on to where we're going to live next or a week pause because the evacuation order doesn't get lifted for your place for a week, you're going to want to be in a place where there's a lot of love, a lot of calm, a lot of peace to deal with the world around you. So I encourage everyone to find an evacuation buddy. I have one, but 150 kilometers, roughly 100 miles from my home.
His basement is mine and my basement is his. He can show up with his family unannounced and I can show up with mine at their basement. We've got, we don't really have supplies preposition, but basically we got blow up air beds, whatever. We will make a safe calm place where we can feed them, house them, water them, take care of them, and give them a place to try to figure out what the heck is going on with their lives next.
And trust me, and I have an alternate one on top of that as well, but trust me, knowing that I have a place to go when I have to leave here on short notice is a huge burden off of my shoulders and knowing that I have the roots and I know those roots by memory. I don't need a map. The cell signal can be down. I know where to turn left.
I know where to turn right. I know the primary highway routes and if they're blocked, I know the back routes. I know all these things by heart and so does my spouse, if for whatever reason I can't drive. The point is that we've taken the time to set up evacuation for success for my family.
We've taken the time to put this plan together. Everybody in the family knows their roles and responsibilities. When it's time to execute the evacuation plan, nobody has to be barking orders. Everybody knows what they're going to do.
Everybody knows what they're going to gather. Everybody knows where they gather at two. Everybody knows where we're going and everybody knows how we're getting there and everybody knows how we're going to take care of ourselves on route. You understand?
All of that costs zero money. Absolutely zero dollars. And yet we know that we can evacuate safely. We know that we can evacuate with everybody.
And if the three people that live in my house are at three different locations in the city, when the evacuation becomes likely, we all know our responsibilities to get back to the house to execute the task required so that we can evacuate. It's all well known. It's rehearsed in a conversational aspect periodically. And that's it.
That's all. It's not that complicated. But hopefully today's reflection on what's going on in the Northwest Territories, the size and the information that's being passed, the ability of the government to do what it's supposed to do and the evacuation orders that are out there and a little bit of conversation about the importance of having an evacuation as part of your trifecta of plans. To deal with chaos and crisis.
Hopefully today was useful and valuable to you. Drop us a line at Jeff at preparedness labs.ca. Jump over. Follow us on our social media.
We are again going live on Wednesday on Instagram for any of you that are interested at 8 p.m. Eastern. We're going to hop on there. Have a bunch of fun conversations.
We're going to continue this weekly. I'm going to put out some more really interesting stuff today about questions to try to generate conversation because that's the whole point. We as a community of practice. This is all free.
It's wide. It's open. If that's how we generate information, that's how we generate knowledge. That's how we share amongst ourselves.
So thank you very much once again for joining us here at Inside My Genuhead. Season 8 is off. Episode 2 is in the books and we will see you next time. Take care and stay safe.