How big a fleet of water bombers does Canada actually need?

Josie Sabatino is right about the big thing (“Canada’s wildfire strategy comes with a price tag,” Aug. 12). The pages of The Hill Times have been filled this month with the politics of smoke and the price of response, and she puts the honest part plainly: wildfire has outgrown the provincial box we keep it in, and treating it as a matter of national interest is overdue. She is right, too, that it will cost real money and take political nerve. But her argument, like most in this debate, steps around the question that decides whether any of that money is well spent: how big a fleet does Canada actually need, and measured against what?

Right now, nobody can say. The number keeps moving. Alberta is buying five. Some say the country needs 50. I have said 100 myself. Ask any of us why that number and not another, and you will get a pause, then a story, but never a calculation. We are shopping for water bombers with no way to say how many we need. Reframing the mission as national, as Sabatino urges, does not fix that. It raises the stakes on getting it wrong.

A fleet is just airplanes. A plan begins with a standard, a promise about how fast a fire gets hit and how small it is kept. France has one, the Guet aérien armé: an armed aerial watch that strikes within about 10 minutes and almost always holds a fire under five hectares. Canada cannot copy that, we have 20 times the forest, but that argues for a different standard, not for none. The honest question is not whether we can catch every fire, because we cannot. It is which ones we choose to catch, and where we settle for monitor-and-defend. Until we set that target, 50 is a number without one. So is 20. So is 100.

Sabatino’s funding idea is clever, and I do not dismiss it. If NATO’s spending pressure opens a door to pay for domestic resilience, walk through it. The government’s conditional sale of surplus Hercules to a British Columbia firm for conversion points the same way, and dual-use is a genuine opportunity. But a budget line is not a plan, and buying is the easy part. Dual-use begs the very questions we keep skipping: dual-use for which mission, sized to what standard, owned by whom? A defence chequebook spent against no measured need just buys a more expensive guess.

And a fleet is a mix, not one airplane. Where there is a lake to dip and a fire small enough to catch, the scooper is unmatched. But much of Canada is mountains, dry country far from water, and towns where the job is saving houses, and there the workhorse is the heavy-lift helicopter, where we own next to nothing. If we are going to spend defence dollars, that gap, not another round of applause for our scoopers, is where a measured plan would send them.

We also do not know whether the aircraft we already own are working. We count the hectares that burn and track almost none of what counts: how fast a fire is hit, whether it is held in the first operational period, how much retardant reaches the line. We buy the planes and skip the scorecard. You cannot manage, or size, or justify to a taxpayer, what you refuse to measure.

Here is where Sabatino’s national-interest framing needs teeth. Calling something a national interest is a start; giving it a national owner is the substance. Fighting fires is provincial, rightly so, but the national picture, the standard, the mix, the industrial base, has no home in Ottawa. Natural Resources holds the forests. Public Safety arrives once it is an emergency. Defence owns the heavy helicopters and flies them for everything but fires. Everyone has a hand in the pot; nobody holds the spoon. A national interest without an owner is just a press release.

So let me turn my own number on myself. I cannot defend 100 any better than the buy-50 crowd can defend 50, because none of us is measuring against a standard that does not exist. That is not an argument for spending less. It is an argument for building the plan first, and fast. An order placed today lands in the 2030s, and the seasons will not wait: 2023 alone burned more than 15 million hectares. Sabatino asks what happens if nothing changes. Here is the sharper version: what happens if everything changes except the one thing that should, and we write the cheque, buy the fleet, and still cannot say whether it is the right one?

Set the standard. Name who owns it. Measure what works. Do that, and the price tag Sabatino rightly warns about buys something we can defend, to our allies, to taxpayers, and to the people whose homes are in the smoke. Until then, sovereignty is just a bigger number with no plan behind it.

John Gradek teaches aviation management at McGill University and is a member of the Transportation Appeal Tribunal of Canada. He writes here in a personal capacity.

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