This year’s deadly wildfires were predicted and unnecessary
In the weeks, months, and years to come, there will be plenty of blame to share for the lapses that let the California wildfires of 2025 get so out of hand, costing lives and tens of billions of dollars. The fact that I wrote “of 2025” to distinguish these fires from other outbreaks should make it clear that these fires are anything but unprecedented, meaning that they should have been anticipated and their causes addressed. That they weren’t points to a massive failure in policy.
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As I write on Sunday, January 12, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley is pointing fingers at Mayor Karen Bass for stripping the department of key resources and funding, California Gov. Gavin Newsom vows to find out the reason fire hydrants went dry during efforts to battle the devastating blazes, and everybody wants to know why a major reservoir in Pacific Palisades was empty and offline for a year. When faced with hard questions, state and local officials including Bass and Newsom are practicing more impressive dodging and weaving than we saw during the Mike Tyson–Jake Paul fight.
But that dodging and weaving can’t erase the serious missteps that led to this very predictable moment.
Regulatory Delays with Devastating Consequences
“Proactive measures like thinning and prescribed burns can significantly reduce wildfire risks, but such projects are often tied up for years in environmental reviews or lawsuits,” Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), told me by email. “In places like California, these delays have had devastating consequences, with restoration work stalled while communities and ecosystems burn to the ground. Addressing the wildfire crisis will require bold policy changes to streamline reviews, cut red tape, and ensure these projects can move forward before it’s too late.”
For example, as I’ve written before, under the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), members of the public and activist groups can formally object to proposed actions, such as forest thinning, through a bureaucratic process that slows matters to a crawl. If that doesn’t deliver results, they move their challenges to the courts and litigate them into submission. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) creates additional red-tape hurdles at the state level, imposing years of delays.
Regan and his colleagues at PERC have frequently addressed this subject—presciently, you might say, except that everybody except California government officials saw this moment coming.
Wasted Water
“From water rules that cause shortages to red tape that fuels extreme wildfires, state and federal policies have deepened California’s most pressing environmental challenges,” Regan wrote in 2023. “As a result, the Golden State now confronts the consequences of these choices, with destructive effects on its natural landscapes, its economy, and its residents.”
“Water in California is often allocated not through markets but through inflexible, acrimonious, and ineffective political processes,” he added. He called out subsidized water—especially, though not exclusively, for agricultural use—which divorces supply from demand. Also at fault are “use it or lose it” rules which discourage water conservation lest allocations be reduced in years to come.
When it comes to sourcing and storing water, “Officials have delayed or rejected proposals to build desalination plants that convert saltwater into drinking water,” even as “the state hasn’t built a significant new reservoir in more than 40 years,” leaving water from rains and floods to flow away, uncaptured. “Nearly all of the water that gushed through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta was flushed out to sea in an effort to comply with state and federal environmental regulations aimed at protecting the delta smelt.”
Badly Managed Forests
Also important, California has failed to effectively manage its forests. “Decades of fire suppression, coupled with a hands-off approach to forest management, have created dangerous fuel loads (the amount of combustible material in a particular area),” Regan wrote. Ominously, he added: “With conditions like this, all it takes to ignite an inferno is a spark and some wind.”
In 2020, Elizabeth Weil of ProPublica also named California’s forest management as a serious concern.
“Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California,” Weil noted. “Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres.” She emphasized that “California would need to burn 20 million acres—an area about the size of Maine—to restabilize in terms of fire.”
As Weil summarized the issue, “We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years.”
The problem is that if you don’t let forests burn in a natural and healthy way while focusing fire suppression on human communities, you’re likely to get out-of-control conflagrations. In the absence of water to fight the resulting fires, you’ve lost any ability to manage the situation.
Reforms To Fix the Mess
In 2021, Holly Fretwell and Jonathan Wood of PERC published Fix America’s Forests: Reforms to Restore National Forests, recommending means to address wildfire risks in California and across the country. To claims that the wildfire problem is overwhelmingly one of climate change, they respond that a “study led by Forest Service scientists estimated that of four factors driving fire severity in the western United States, live fuel ‘was the most important,’ accounting for 53 percent of average relative influence, while climate accounted for 14 percent.” Climate matters, but other policy choices matter more.
Fretwell and Wood recommend restricting the scope of regulatory reviews that stands in the way of forest restoration, requiring that lawsuits against restoration projects be filed quickly, and excluding prescribed burns from carbon emissions calculations that can stand in the way of such projects.
They also want to expand markets for construction materials, fuel pellets, and other products that can be made from trees removed while clearing potential fuel. That would make forest restoration profitable and allow it to be handled, at least in part, by private industry. I’ve written about such efforts before, including a promising effort in Northern Arizona.
“There is broad agreement on the need for better forest management, but outdated policies and regulatory hurdles continue to delay critical restoration efforts,” Regan told me.
If government officials finally take these hard-learned lessons to heart and ease the process of providing and storing water, restoring forests, and fighting fires, Californians might be spared from future disasters. They seem poised to work with the incoming Trump administration on exactly that. But reforms will come too late for those who have already lost lives, homes, and businesses.
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Our allies no longer doubt our values – they doubt our value.
Ten years after promising a return to global relevance, Canada’s foreign policy is defined not by what we do – but by what we fail to do – or fail to show up for.
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared in 2015 that “Canada is back,” he promised to restore the country’s global voice and moral leadership. Ten years later, Canada is indeed back – but not in the way he intended. We are back to irrelevance, back to strategic incoherence, and back to being ignored by allies and adversaries alike. Across a decade of shifting crises, Canadian foreign policy under Prime Ministers Trudeau and Carney have become a case study in good intentions, miserable excuses, poor execution, and chronic unseriousness.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS). In October 2014, Stephen Harper’s government committed six CF-18 Hornets, two CP-140 Auroras, and a CC-150 Polaris refueller to the US-led coalition against ISIS, forming the backbone of Canada’s Operation Impact. Canadian aircraft conducted 251 airstrikes in the first six months, striking ISIS positions in Iraq and later Syria. When Trudeau took office in November 2015, his first major foreign-policy act was to withdraw the CF-18s, formally announced on February 8, 2016. The air campaign ended within weeks, replaced by a “train-advise-assist” mission that expanded our trainers in northern Iraq but sharply reduced our combat capability and influence. The decision was framed as moral sophistication but in practice it was viewed as a marked retreat.
The Syrian refugee crisis that erupted in 2015 became the emotional centrepiece of the Trudeau Liberals’ election campaign and his government’s first term – a symbolic gesture of compassion that ignored operational realities. Within weeks of taking office, Ottawa pledged to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees by February 2016, compressing a process that normally took a year into just 100 days. The first flights landed in Toronto and Montreal on December 10, 2015, to global and domestic applause. Behind the scenes, the RCMP and CSIS officials warned that the accelerated timeline left gaps in security screening, and the provinces struggled to provide housing and integration services. It was in the end humanitarian theatre – an election promise kept at the expense of process, capacity, and Canadian national security.
The Syrian refugee crisis saw the Trudeau government jettison Canada’s immigration policy for domestic political purposes. A few years later, when Canadians who had joined ISIS – so-called “foreign fighters” – began to return home between 2017 and 2023, the same government that had championed compassion responded with confusion. Roughly 60 foreign fighters returned to Canada, yet very few were successfully prosecuted under federal anti-terrorism laws. Instead, Ottawa relied on peace bonds, deradicalization programs, and surveillance costing millions of dollars per case. The spectacle intensified in 2022 and 2023 with the repatriation, under court order, of dozens of ISIS brides and their children from Kurdish detention camps. Many arrivals required extensive monitoring and support while families of ISIS victims protested that justice had been denied. The government’s oft-repeated line that “a Canadian is a Canadian” sounded inclusive; it came to symbolize moral inconsistency and policy drift. Critics viewed the hospitality bill reported in the popular press for ISIS Brides and children as an irresponsible fiscal and moral outrage.
Afghanistan was the ultimate test of Canada’s so-called “feminist foreign policy,” and it failed dramatically. When Kabul fell on August 15, 2021, Ottawa was unprepared despite months of intelligence warnings about the Taliban’s advance, and a knowledge of the Biden administration’s draw down and withdrawal. Operation Aegis, Canada’s evacuation effort, began late and ended early. Between August 4 and 26, the Canadian Armed Forces managed three evacuation flights, moving about 3,700 people while allies such as the US and the UK moved tens of thousands. The final RCAF flight departed before the US withdrawal on August 30, leaving hundreds of locally employed interpreters, contractors, and NGO partners stranded. Subsequent reports confirmed that internal direction from the defence minister led officials to prioritize select religious minorities like Sikhs with political connections over interpreters and Afghan women who had worked with Canadian agencies. Veterans and civil-society groups accused Ottawa of politicizing rescue lists while publicly boasting of compassion. For all the talk of empowering women and girls, the people most at risk were left behind in favour of Canadian domestic political interests in the Liberals’ Sikh support base.
In the Middle East, the 2018 rupture with Saudi Arabia remains one of the costliest self-inflicted diplomatic crises in recent memory. A tweet from the Foreign Minister calling for the release of a dissident sparked sweeping retaliation from Riyadh: the expulsion of Canada’s ambassador, suspension of trade and investment, cancellation of flights, and the withdrawal of thousands of Saudi students from Canadian universities. The Gulf Cooperation Council sided with Riyadh, leaving Canada isolated. It took more than four years to rebuild relations, and during that period Ottawa was excluded from key regional energy and security discussions. The episode became a cautionary tale of social-media diplomacy without strategy.
Canada’s approach to Israel and Palestine mirrored the pattern of ambiguity that has defined our broader foreign policy under the Trudeau and Carney liberals. Beginning in 2019, Ottawa reversed a long-standing position by supporting a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements and endorsing Palestinian statehood – Canada’s first such vote in 14 years. When Hamas launched its October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks against Israel that killed more than 1,200 people, Canada’s initial response was cautious and slow. Statements emphasized proportionality and restraint rather than moral clarity. Two years later, in April 2025, Ottawa recognized a Palestinian state while hostilities with Hamas and other Iranian-backed groups were ongoing. The move alienated allies in Washington and Jerusalem, who warned that premature recognition risked legitimizing a territory still controlled by organizations committed to Israel’s destruction. President Trump went as far as to suggest that Canada had rewarded Hamas for the October 7 terror attack on Israel.
On Iran, engagement drifted into accommodation. After years of delay, Ottawa finally listed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist entity in 2025 – long after allies such as the United States had done so and only following sustained pressure from Parliament and the families of victims of Flight PS752, which the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) shot down in January 2020, killing 55 Canadian citizens and 30 Canadian permanent residents. The long-overdue designation was more symbolic than strategic. Canada has become, by default, a refuge for individuals linked to the Iranian regime, including relatives of senior officials who live and invest here with impunity. Members of the Iranian diaspora report regular intimidation, surveillance, and threats from Tehran’s proxies operating on Canadian soil – activities that persist despite repeated calls for stronger counterintelligence and enforcement. For all its rhetorical commitment to human rights, Ottawa has failed to translate outrage into action. What passes for engagement with Iran today is less diplomacy than moral fatigue disguised as principle.
Relations with the US fared little better. The renegotiation of NAFTA in 2017–18 produced the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) – a deal that preserved supply management but conceded ground on automotive exports and dispute-resolution mechanisms. Tariffs on steel and aluminum followed in 2025, and Canada’s retaliatory levies could not hide the reality of diminished leverage. Chronic under–investment in defence and intelligence further eroded trust. When the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia formed the AUKUS pact in 2021 to share advanced defence technology, Canada was not consulted. In 2022, after years of frustrating delays, NORAD modernization hedged forward but by 2025 Canada had yet committed the full $38 billion required to upgrade continental defences. Years of delay in replacing the CF-18 fighter fleet key to NORAD – starting during the 2015 election campaign by the Trudeau Liberals – only resolved when Ottawa reversed course and ordered the same F-35s in 2023, the same planes that Trudeau once derided. In 2025, Prime Minister Carney placed the F-35 purchase under an election campaign review – reinforcing the impression of drift. To allies, Canada increasingly appeared as a moral commentator rather than a security contributor.
The federal government’s misreading of China compounded the damage. While allies recalibrated against Beijing’s coercion, Ottawa continued to chase trade and investment under the illusion that China could be both partner and rival to play off against the US. That fiction collapsed in December 2018 when Beijing detained Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. The two men spent 1,020 days in secret detention under harsh conditions before their release in September 2021 – the same day Meng returned to China. Ottawa’s response throughout was hesitant, relying on “quiet diplomacy.” Even as other democracies expelled Chinese diplomats and banned Huawei, Canada delayed until 2022, becoming the last member of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to act. Beijing’s execution and death sentences for Canadian citizens in 2019 elicited only muted protest by the Trudeau government. Despite fresh warnings of political interference in domestic affairs and elections campaigns, progress toward a foreign-influence registry remains halting. The cumulative impression is of a government reluctant to confront reality even as its allies in North America, Europe, and Asia are hardening their stance against Beijing.
Europe tells a similar story. The war in Ukraine has exposed the gulf between Canada’s rhetoric and its resources. Although NATO adopted its two-per cent-of-GDP defence-spending target in 2014, successive Canadian governments have treated it more as aspiration than obligation. Publicly, the Trudeau government endorsed the goal; privately, Trudeau told NATO leaders in 2017 that Canada would “never” reach it, a remark later reported in the Washington Post and confirmed by alliance officials. Eight years on, the numbers bear him out. Canada’s defence spending has hovered near 1.4 per cent of GDP, third from the bottom in NATO, even as Poland and the Baltic states have surged past four per cent and re-armed against Russia.
Under Prime Minister Carney, Ottawa now insists that the target will finally be met – on paper at least. In June 2025, the Carney government pledged to reach the spending benchmark by March 31, 2026, under what officials describe as a “re-baselined” accounting framework. In practice, much of the projected increase relies on broad definitions of “defence-related” spending – everything from veterans’ benefits and pensions to Arctic infrastructure and cybersecurity initiatives – that many allies may not accept as true military expenditure. To use a polite phrase, there is considerable voodoo math involved.
Equally puzzling is Ottawa’s rhetorical commitment to a new NATO 5-per cent-of-GDP goal without any credible path or plan to achieve it. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Canada’s military aid to Ukraine has remained constant but promised weapons shipments have been delayed or cancelled and participation in major NATO exercises curtailed by personnel and equipment shortages. At home, procurement paralysis has left the Canadian Army, Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force under-equipped and increasingly unready for its primary role of defending Canada. Meanwhile, Ottawa refused for years to leverage Canada’s vast natural-gas reserves to help Europe reduce dependence on Russian energy, insisting there was “no business case” for Atlantic Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) exports. Only after 2025, under Carney, did talk of trade and energy re-engagement resume – too late to shape outcomes. In Brussels, Canada is now viewed less as a dependable ally than as a rhetorical one: a country that still talks like a middle power but spends like a minor one.
The sum of these choices is a Canada that no longer matters as it once did. We are too hesitant to deter, too divided to lead, and too sanctimonious to partner effectively. The language of virtue has replaced the practice of real strategy. Foreign policy is not theatre; it is the disciplined pursuit of national interest, backed by capability and clarity. For ten years we have confused applause at home and sometimes abroad with achievement and hashtags with hard power. The result is a diminished country adrift in an age of international danger – irrelevant in Washington, distrusted in Jerusalem, ignored in Riyadh, dismissed in Beijing, and barely tolerated in Brussels. Our allies no longer doubt our values – they doubt our value.
So, how do we not lose the next decade too? If Canada is to regain its standing, it must first rediscover seriousness. That means returning to the fundamentals of statecraft: credible defence spending, strong military power, clear strategic priorities, and the courage to act rather than advertise. Meeting NATO’s two-per cent commitment must be a floor, not a mirage built on creative accounting. Canada must modernize its armed forces, rebuild its defence industrial base, and restore operational readiness in the Arctic and abroad.
Diplomatically, Ottawa must re-anchor itself within the democratic alliance system – treating Washington, London, and Brussels as indispensable partners rather than convenient props. Engagement with China should be rooted in deterrence and human-rights enforcement, not wishful economics. Canada needs to field a well-equipped brigade in Latvia and lead by example to deter Russia. In the Middle East, Canada must again stand firmly with Israel’s right to exist while pushing back on Iran and its regional proxies.
Canada must once again take a principled stance on human rights and targeted economic development compatible with our national interests and the strategic realities on the ground in regions like Africa.
At home, foreign policy should once again serve national interest rather than transactional domestic political theatre. Canada’s influence was never built on slogans but on capability, credibility, and sacrifice – from Vimy Ridge to Juno Beach and from Kapyong to Kandahar. Those qualities are not lost; they are merely dormant. The path back is not through hashtags or press conferences, but through purpose, power, and principle. Only when Canada stops pretending to lead and starts preparing to lead will the world take us seriously again. If “Canada is back” is ever to mean something again, it must be said not from a podium, but from a position of strength. Power respects power – and until Canada remembers that – no one will remember us.
Joe Varner is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Center for North American Prosperity and Security, and deputy director of the Conference of Defence Associations.
Federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) continue to fund invalid, ideologically driven “scientific” research that subsidizes leftist activists and harms conservatives and the American people at large. There’s currently no plan to stop.
Conversely, NIH does not fund obvious research topics that would help the American people, because of institutional leftist bias.
While serving as a senior advisor at NIH, I discovered many active grants like these:
I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!
The study claimed that people saw COVID as less “serious” after the tweet. I apologize for the flashback to when Democrats demanded everyone feel the exact level of COVID panic and anti-optimism they felt (and share their false beliefs on the efficacy of school closures, masks, and vaccines ). NIH fundedthis study and gave him another $651,586 in July for his new “misinformation” study, including $200,000 from the Office of the Director.
I’m a social psychologist who has focused on the harms of ideological bias in academic research. Our sensemaking institutions have been gashed by a cult political ideology that treats its conjectures and abstractions as descriptively true, without argument or even explanation, and enforces conformity with inhumane psychologizing and ostracism. This ideology – which dominates academia and NIH – poses an unprecedented threat to our connection to reality, and thus to science, by vaporizing the distinction between descriptive reality and ideological tenets.
In March, I emailed Jay Bhattacharya, Director of NIH, and pitched him on how I could build an objective framework to eliminate ideological bias in NIH-funded research.
Jay seemed to agree with my analysis. We spoke on the phone, and I started in May as a senior advisor to Jay in the Office of the Director (NIH-OD).
I never heard from Jay again beyond a couple of cursory replies.
For four months, I read tons of grants, passed a lengthy federal background check, started to build the pieces, and contacted Jay about once a week with questions, follow-up, and example grants. Dead air – he was ghosting me.
Jay also bizarrely deleted the last two months’ worth of my messages to him but kept the older ones. I’d sent him a two-page framework summary, asked if I should keep working on it, and also asked if I’d done something wrong, given his persistent lack of response. No response.
In September, the contractors working at NIH-OD, me included, were laid off. No explanation was given.
I have no idea what happened here. It’s been the strangest and most unprofessional experience of my career.
The result is that NIH is still funding ideological, scientifically invalid research and will continue to ignore major topics because of leftist bias. We have a precious opportunity for lasting reform, and that opportunity will be lost without a systematic approach to eliminating ideology in science.
What’s happened so far is that DOGE cut some grants earlier this year, after a search for DEI terms. It was a good first step but caught some false positives and missed most of the ideological research, including many grants premised on “microaggressions,” “systemic racism,” “intersectionality,” and other proprietary, question-begging leftist terms. Leftist academics are already adapting by changing their terminology – this meme is popular on Bluesky:
DOGE didn’t have the right search terms, and a systematic, objective anti-bias framework is necessary to do the job. It’s also more legally resilient and persuasive to reachable insiders — there’s no way to reform a huge bureaucracy without getting buy-in from some insiders (yes, you also have to fire some people). This mission requires empowered people at every funding agency who are thoroughly familiar with leftist ideology, can cleanly define “ideology,” and build robust frameworks to remove it from scientific research.
My framework identifies four areas of bias so far:
Ideological research
Rigged research
Ideological denial of science / suppression of data
Missing research – research that would happen if not for leftist bias
The missing research at NIH likely hurts the most — e.g. American men commit suicide at unusually high rates, especially white and American Indian men, yet NIH funds no research on this. But they do fund “Hypertension Self-management in Refugees Living in San Diego.”
Similarly, NIH is AWOL on the health benefits of religious observance and prayer, a promising area of research that Muslim countries are taking the lead on. These two gaping holes suggest that NIH is indifferent to the American people and even culturally and ideologically hostile them.
Joe Duarte grew up in small copper-mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. You can find his workhere, find him on Xhere, and contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.
