We used to call this “summer.” Now it’s “fire season.” I don’t remember when this began, although in fairness, I don’t fully remember much. I guess it was 20 years back, when the predicted effects of global warming started to come true. Back then, politicians and “experts” debated the relevance of human activity on climate. Ironically, the political dinosaurs—so fixated on oil and the wealth of the 60s and 70s—failed to learn the lessons of the real dinosaur age. When the climate changes, the world changes. We know that now. Jesus, Mary and fucking Joseph, we knew it then, too, it’s just that some assholes wouldn’t acknowledge it.
Back then, some political parties made their policies based on ignoring the science and pandering to the big oil companies, who paid the bills for them. Bought and sold. The entire economy of the country was based on extracting oil and gas, and then burning it in oversized vehicles. I remember one pretend-folksy politician bragging about how he drove his truck three hours to work every morning in the city. All that advertising and posturing was paid for by oil companies, who owned the premier too. That squeaky wheel got the grease and squeaked louder. He was such an expert of everything, especially for a guy who couldn’t keep anything in black ink. No matter what he ran, it went bankrupt, including the government. Oh, but he was sure a nice guy. Yup, all folksy and warm while he sold you down the river.
I got onto this line of thought because the government news channel is full of the usual fire season warnings this morning, but with an added twist. For years, the northern forests have been set alight each dry spring, wildfires raging across the landscape, devouring the northern forests and communities. It’s come to the point where most of it is gone. The great fishing lakes of the north are now charcoal pits of burned trees, the northern communities were burned out so many times that insurance became no longer affordable or even available, and the great wave of southern migration began.
There was a year, maybe 2015, when the first terrible fires hit, and northern people were brought south in convoys of buses. The government housed them in university dormitories for weeks, and the local shopping malls and city places filled with northerners, some enjoying the opportunity, and some medicating the anxiety and frustration. That was the first time I remember it, but it eventually became the norm. For a few years, the southern migration happened during fire season, and then by autumn people would make their way back, and re-build, repair or just survive in the places they knew. When that became impossible, the cities grew, but of course there was not infrastructure to accommodate, and all the larger cities started sprouting tent suburbs. Regina had a lot of empty downtown lots, which eventually filled with tents, as did the parks and green spaces across the city. At first, outraged citizenry and officials called on the police to move them, and they did, but it became clear that was not an option in the Regina Riot of 2025.
People made comparisons to the 1935 Regina Riot, and I guess there are similarities, but this was a little different. Well, a lot different. In 1935, police charged into a hundred or so people on a downtown square and were fought off with mostly rocks and sticks. Although testimony from a later inquiry did show bullet holes in the police vehicle, they could’ve been police bullets also. A few injuries, one death, and a dozen arrests. The 1500 or so participants in the “On to Ottawa Trek” were soon sent back west on trains. It was big stuff for the times, and there were some consequences in the frontier-like city of the day, but not like 2025.
The north was on fire, and the air was smoky and overcast for 500 miles in every direction, and thousands of people arrived in the city, which had not enough resources to cope with them. Imagine a hot June day in 2030, with 38°C heat, a hot wind, and months of dryness ahead of it. Thousands met on the square in front of City Hall to demand help, and just like in 1935, an edgy police force jumped in to restrain some people, and started a wave of violence, damage and looting that went on for three days. Once people in other parts of the city heard about the trouble, they came to the downtown core, and before long they took over and looted bars, restaurants and offices throughout the downtown. Regina did not have enough of a police force to get it under control, and at one point their high-impact tactical vehicles were taken. Crews were overwhelmed by numbers and dragged out of the vehicles, which then became battering rams for breaking the plate glass windows and doors from office towers and banks.
Of course, blame was laid at the feet of northern Indigenous people who were in the city, but it wasn’t that simple. There were thousands of city people involved, including inner city, gangs, petty criminals and right-wing squads of Soldiers of Odin and other odious off-shoots of the racist, political right, as it was then called. The riot became a complex soup of right-wing zealots trying to “clean up” the problem, while taking full advantage of the criminal opportunities, and the poor and disenfranchised defending themselves against both the police and the zealots.
Hard to believe that was 20 years ago, but there you are. All that’s changed is that the fires aren’t in the north anymore. There is no, north, really. What’s left up there is a charred landscape of ashes, sand and rocks. Trees are gone, rivers and lakes are muddy trickles if still viable, and the people are gone. There was no place to live that didn’t regularly burn, and no more money to rebuild. The people came south, and they weren’t welcomed. Where agriculture still existed in the south, people made their farms into armed camps—actual forts around the farmyard like the old western movies back when there was a Hollywood. That burned too. Same shit, different cesspool.
All of this happened on the back of a world pandemic that killed millions. The Covid-19 pandemic ripped through populations, including ours, and lasted three years, with wave after wave of illness, mostly brought on by stupidity and bad management. Stupidity, because a year into the pandemic, everyone knew how to control it, but our government couldn’t bring themselves to do what was necessary and right. And, big surprise here, the people making the decisions were most removed from the suffering. The leader who followed pretty-boy bankrupt had even less sense of connection. He refused to visit hospitals to encourage the staff and patients, wouldn’t meet with suffering people who came to see him, and just generally was really bad at the job. This is how we got here: on the backs of a bunch of entitled pricks with their hands deep in the cash register and one foot on the road out.
It would be bad enough if he had just been stupid. We’ve all been stupid, and we’ve all had jobs in which we could’ve worked harder. Well, maybe not you, but me for sure. I get it. This was a different level of stupid, though. This was more along the lines of callous disregard and criminal negligence to meet political goals. Before any of us knew how bad it would be, or how long it would take to resolve, the government spent their days laughing at the physicians, and making jokes about “Dr. Doom.” Turns out it wasn’t so funny. Hundreds were dead, the worst-per-capita pandemic numbers in the country, businesses closed and—by the time it was all over—the medical system was shredded and the social outcomes such as homelessness, addiction, overdoses were staggering. And most of it was all avoidable. Given a roadmap by leading physicians and researchers, the government tossed it in the ditch, took the fun-looking grid road and ended up tearing the oil pan off the car. “Hold my beer,” they seemed to be saying, and clearly not for the first time in their lives.
The strangest part of all that was how so many people decided they knew better than science, and refused to take a free vaccine that would save their lives. Appalling misinformation circulated on what was then called “social media” and people bought it. Some had drunk deep of the religious Kool Aid. “Jesus will protect us!” “Natural immunity.” I guess Jesus wasn’t that bothered, because eventually the unvaccinated started getting sick by the thousands, and it pretty much overwhelmed the health system, and forced medical professionals to deal with so many deathly sick people who thought it was all a hoax. Even worse, the numbers overwhelming the medical system and forced the cessation and cancellation of many other vital treatments. The birthplace of medicare in North America became the birthplace of multi-tiered medical care in Canada. Once again, political donors get paid off.
I guess this all sounds pretty negative, but there were some upsides. The goddamn winters got better, that’s one thing. There was a time when people howled about the lack of snow and cold. It’s tough to be a true, redneck Saskatchewan-ian unless you can drive your snowmobile drunk in 20-below weather and flip it going too fast through ditches. The number of assholes who injured themselves when snow got scarce kept climbing until people just started using ATVs all year round. Then it levelled out, because people are still assholes and ATVs are a whole other way to kill yourself. Barbed wire is even harder to see with no snow to give away the fence posts, and of course the country became a maze of booby traps to protect the farms from scavengers on the land. Winter became the season when the fires stopped, or at least slowed down. It was a little colder than usual, with more rain, but the days of snowbanks higher than houses were long past. And, some of us didn’t mind. I hated fucking snow. Good riddance.
I’m trying to think of the other upsides, and I can’t. Except that maybe the pressure on cities and the death of Old Man Winter was around the time when governments started thinking that cheaper booze and weed was the answer. Keep people happy, give them something to do, and at the same time, government can cash in on the profits. This would also be about the time the phrase “cheaper than water” disappeared from the language. Water is the most expensive fucking thing you can buy, and most of it is bad. But the beer was cheap. I don’t know how they do that, given that beer is supposed to be made with fresh water, but I might not like the beer anymore if I asked. So, I won’t ask.
Things are pretty regulated now. There’s a wide swath of firebreak outside the city limits, and thousands of new apartment buildings built around the edge of the city for the recent arrivals. Nothing like making the traumatized victims of fire the actual firewall for a city. The funny thing about the firebreak around Regina is that they made it from the remainder of the giant highways they built at one point. There wasn’t really a demand for the highways, except from the construction industry that was a top-level donor for the governing party. And building a giant highway means having access to the land on which you’re going to build it, so of course a dollar or two was made on land speculation and flipping by friends of the government. The people who owned the land were paid bottom dollar according to the land assessment, while speculators with inside information were able to sell it to the government and turns millions in profits overnight.
Smaller towns and even cities have disappeared, and if you want to live in a Saskatchewan urban space, you have two choices. Everything else is gone. I keep asking myself if I should stay here, but I’m down to zero options now also. Everywhere in the country is the same. The landscape is parched and burned, dangerous to travel, and not safe to stay in the rural areas. You’re not welcome or wanted on people’s farms, and now there’s no pretending “hangfire” or “accidental” shooting—people will just straight out shoot you in the head without lying about it. There was a time when those incidents were largely racially motivated, but that’s not the case as much anymore.
The racial lines are all a little blurred these days. With a growing population, and southward migration, pretty much everyone has Indigenous blood now. The “white supremacist” groups of generations past slowly dwindled, although where they did remain they ended up being in positions of authority. It seemed like a good idea at the time, people said. I could never stomach the thought of them, even in the days of greatest chaos, but some people are willing to trade anything to secure their place. Anything.
The big talk back in the ’20s was “reconciliation”. Following years of inquiries into the most obvious of terrible things, the Federal government of the day published a huge report on “Truth and Reconciliation” which was intended to be a pathway for all people to reconcile the colonial atrocities of the past. Trouble was, people were still electing politicians who thought there were no problems, that “you can’t erase history”, that people “meant well” and actions shouldn’t be “taken out of context.” Civic leaders complained when people wanted to remove statues of racists. “Oh, you can’t just erase history!” No, but you sure can put statues of assholes in storage, and we don’t have to name schools after them. “Oh, but we haven’t canvassed everyone on this change!” No, and no one got asked when generations of kids were sent off to be raped, beaten and starved.
Well, the wheel’s come around now. Most of the churches are social clubs and bars now, and nobody really wants to consider religious life because of the multiple labels that come with it. Religion became a comforting dram for the wealthy rather than morphine for the poor. The only churches that still exist are the business churches that make their prophets a profit. Pay your fees, receive the word of the Lord, and don’t mind that the preacher always drives a better car than you. Amen.
[This started as one thing and never fully turned into another. There is thick smoke in the air today in Saskatchewan, and we have a government that is actively promoting “Oil and Gas Education” in high schools, while northern forests and communities burn, and we all breathe the smoke.]