By Cheryl Jahn

Fire Smart BC

Dwindling Fire Smart dollars concerning

Mar 11, 2026 | 3:48 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – Each year at this time, civic officials start to the work of preparing Northerners for wildfires. FireSmart BC, originated in 1990 as an initiative to manage wildland-urban interface risks, designed to increase wildfire resilience through education, mitigation, and community planning.

“Fire Smart is really a program, led by communities, where we’re trying to get the word out to let people know what the things that they can do in and around their own home and property to, make it more resilient to a wildfire,” explains Tanya Spooner, Manager of Emergency Programs for the City. “So there’s things that you can do, immediately around your home in that first meter and a half, all the way up to about 30 metres out.”

And every year, training of emergency response gets underway good and early. Since Fire Smart’s inception, there has been funding in the budget to do it. But the most recent provincial budget essentially revealed the the funding pot is dry, and allocated $15 million as a reprieve. Very concerning for the chair of the Regional District.

“We know just how important it is to start reducing the risk of fire in the interface area in our communities,” says Lara Beckett. “We’ve put a lot of time and effort into raising awareness, bringing, you know, people on to trying to do something on their own properties, trying to support that work.”

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But she says how the $15 million will be doled out is still the great unknown for local governments.

“It’s too early. It depends partly on the stage each local government is at in sort of putting together their fire spending plans. So, depending where you are in that planning process is what, pockets of funding you can apply for. So it really depends.”

And wildfires can creep up at any time and travel at 60 kilometres per hour. It leaves little time to prepare. So preparing is important. And the City is no exception

“There’s a lot of scientific evidence that shows that that can actually be even more effective in a wildfire than, some of these major projects that we’ve done in the past,” says Spooner. “We’ve got examples like Logan Lake, where we’ve seen fires, we’ve seen fires hit those communities, and they’ve come out of it really well because they had a significant fire smart program in place.”

Spooner says there is the anticipation the remainder of the money will be dedicated to Fire Smart programs rather than larger programs.