A Quebec resident who last summer shared conspiracy theories online that the Canadian government was deliberately setting fires to convince people that climate change was happening has now pleaded guilty to setting more than a dozen fires.
Brian Paré, 38, pleaded guilty to starting 14 fires in the Chibougamau area of Quebec between May and September 2023. Last year was the worst fire season on record in Canada, with a total of 45 million acres burned. For many days, smoke from the wildfires spread across North America and around the world, degrading air quality and disrupting the daily lives of millions of people.
Two of the fires set by Mr Paré forced people to evacuate around 500 homes in the town of Chapais in late May, according to a statement by the prosecutor, Marie-Philippe Charron, in court and reported in the Canadian press. One of these, the Lake Cavan fire, burned more than 2,000 acres of forest and was the largest of the fires that Mr Paré admitted to starting. The court hearing took place on Monday; Sentencing is expected in April.
Rising global temperatures are contributing to longer fire seasons and increased lightning strikes, which were responsible for starting Canada’s most damaging wildfires last year.
Paré had shared posts on Facebook over the summer claiming that the government was intentionally failing to control and even deliberately starting the fires. Some of Paré’s posts also deny the existence of climate change and link the fires to conspiracy theories that suggest governments are inventing phenomena such as climate change and Covid-19 to justify new restrictions and regulations.
Paré’s posts were part of a larger wave of misinformation in the wake of the fires, fitting a pattern that has followed other extreme weather events such as floods, heat waves and droughts.
“All of these have generated a lot of buzz and, as a result, various forms of misinformation,” said Chris Wells, an associate professor of media studies at Boston University who researches climate disinformation. “When an event like this happens, the obvious question today arises: ‘To what extent is this related to climate change?’”
The specific type of conspiracy theory shared by Mr Paré – linking climate change and climate-related policies to ulterior motives on the part of governments – is also common, Dr Wells explained. “It’s part of a larger realm of conspiratorial thinking.”
In reality, climate change is contributing to worsening wildfires in several ways, said Mike Flannigan, a wildfire professor at Thompson Rivers University in Canada. In addition to longer fire seasons and more lightning strikes, warmer air also sucks moisture out of vegetation, creating more dry fuel for fires.
While the scale of the 2023 fires was “off the charts” and may not happen again any time soon, overall “we will see more years of active fires in the future than in the past,” Dr. Flannigan said.