I must confess that I am finding it harder than usual to focus on my work today. For those of you who don’t know, my home province of Manitoba is facing an unprecedented outbreak of hundreds of wildfires across its vast northern and eastern forests, leading to a human evacuation on a scale not seen since the Great Red River Flood of 1997.

An article from yesterday’s Globe and Mail newspaper summarizes the gravity of the situation:

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew has declared a state of emergency for at least 30 days, as multiple wildfires are spreading across vast parts of the entire province, forcing more than 17,000 people to evacuate their homes.

The province has called upon the Canadian Armed Forces to fly residents from several northern communities toward safer areas, Mr. Kinew said Wednesday evening, just hours after seeking the military assistance from Prime Minister Mark Carney. The majority of those people will be temporarily housed in Winnipeg, where soccer fields and arenas are being readied to become large-scale evacuation centres.

“This is the largest evacuation Manitoba will have seen in most people’s living memory,” Mr. Kinew told reporters at the provincial legislature, as cellphones chimed loudly with emergency alerts. “For the first time, it’s not a fire in one region. We have fires in every region.”

An evacuation order has been issued for the mining city of Flin Flon, more than 820 kilometres north of Winnipeg, where roughly 5,000 people live along the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border.

Slightly west, along the shores of the Nelson River, the Northern communities of Pimicikamak Cree Nation, Cross Lake, Norway House and Mathias Colomb First Nation in Pukatawagan near the Pas are also being mandated to vacate by Thursday.

Meanwhile, the province is advising residents in eastern Manitoba to remain prepared for further evacuations with emergency kits and car fuel, as a roughly 31,200-hectare fire remains out of control along the border with Ontario.

As of today, these spring wildfires spreading across eastern and northern Manitoba are among the most devastating my province has seen in decades. Over a hundred fires have consumed nearly 4,000 square kilometres of forest, an area approaching ten times the size of Winnipeg, where emergency shelters have been set up in several hockey arenas and an indoor soccer complex to house the evacuees.

It is hard for me, to go about my regular workday, when so many of my fellow Manitobans are hurriedly packing up their lives and families and flying or driving south to the safety of Winnipeg, not knowing when or if they are ever going to see their homes again. Coming so hard on the heels of the shocks imposed upon Canadians by the wrenching and worrying changes in its relationship with its largest trading partner, the United States, and I must confess that I am feeling, at times, stressed out and overwhelmed. Toss into the mix a recent home computer crash, plus a serious tax mistake made by my former financial planner for which I am, over one year later, still waiting for a favourable resolution from my bank. And so on and so forth. I know that I am still a very fortunate man compared to many people who live on this planet, but still, it’s been a lot to deal with. And, at times, I have failed to deal with it well.

One of the lessons I have taken from the stressful situations over the past year is that I need to more clearly differentiate between what I have control over and what I don’t, and focusing on the former rather than wasting time and energy on the latter. This also means that, at times, I have chosen to step away from the little social media that I still do consume (mostly Reddit, which I peruse anonymously), as well as to deliberately avoid reading the news media, in order to preserve my mental and emotional health.

For example, during the first few months of the absolute batshit craziness emanating from Donald Trump’s second term as president (over which I had zero control, except to change my shopping habits), I assiduously avoided the mainstream news media by spending my evenings and weekends intently focused on cleaning through and reorganizing the voluminous inventory of my main Second Life avatar, Vanity Fair. And I full well realize what I was doing: investing time and energy into something that I could control, rather than fall further into a depressive, anxious spiral over so many other things that I had little-to-no control over. Such is the benefit of an all-encompassing hobby!

Find your little niche, your little happy space, and build a safe haven there for when you need to do something to protect your mental state from the chaos, craziness, brutality, and heartbreak of the real world. Even if you can only get away to it for half an hour or a couple of hours at a time, the flow state you enter while pursuing your obsessive little hobby gives your brain a chance to escape the hamster-wheel of worry. Interestingly (well, at least, interesting to me) is that I also find I get into this state when I am composing a blog post such as this one!

Anyways, back to the original point of this blogpost: my world is currently on fire, both figuratively and literally. It’s going to be a long, hot summer. I still haven’t made any decisions about what I am going to do with this blog (no change there), but I probably will still post every so often, just to let you all know I’m still here. And—if you do believe—please say a prayer for us besieged Manitobans. Thanks.

UPDATE June 3rd, 2025: The Free Press has an update on the wildfire situation here. As luck would have it, this past weekend was the Winnipeg Pride festival, with a rally at, and a parade leading from, the Manitoba Legislative Building. Premier Web Kinew, the first First Nations premier in Manitoba’s history, mentioned in his speech that this was the first ever Pride held during a state of emergency (and hopefully, the last). When I went in to work on Saturday to pick up a book, there was a Flin Flon transit bus parked in the parking lot behind my library. Things are definitely askew around here! But we adapt.

Manitobans tend to pull together for the common good in times of emergency, like blizzards, floods, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the current wildfire situation, with many people volunteering or donating money to help those displaced by the forest fires. This is one of the things that I love the most about my province, my home.

UPDATE June 4th, 2025: Here’s a list from the Free Press on where and how you can donate and/or volunteer to help wildfire evacuees (with an archived version if you should hit a paywall). Although many of the evacuees are being given shelter here in Winnipeg, many are being sent as far away as Niagara Falls, Ontario, due to a shortage of available hotel rooms.

UPDATE June 10th, 2025: Smoke from wildfires in northern Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba is still an everyday part of the weather here in southern Manitoba. Some days are better than others, but yesterday was BAD.

As someone with lifelong asthma, yesterday’s wildfire smoke in the air here in Winnipeg really messed with my lungs, causing me to reach for my rescue inhaler multiple times throughout the day. An article in yesterday’s Free Press discusses the short and long-term health effects of breathing smoke from wildfires, and profiles two people who struggle as I sometimes do when there’s smoke in the air (here’s an archived version of the article if you hit a paywall).

Most concerning to me is the fact that microscopic smoke particles can go deep into our lungs and even enter our bloodstream, and could possibly lead to cancer down the road. Keeping my fingers crossed that this won’t happen to me (I’ve already had one cancer scare which, thankfully, turned out not to be the case.)

UPDATE June 11th, 2025: The wildfire situation in Manitoba is not improving. Here’s a quote from The Globe and Mail newspaper:

In Manitoba, nearly 21,000 have been forced to flee their homes, as the province continues to grapple with 25 large wildfires.

One fire near Nopiming Provincial Park measures 218,700 hectares, or roughly five times the size of Winnipeg, officials noted Tuesday, while another fire near Flin Flon, Man., is 307,780 hectares, or about seven times Winnipeg’s size.

Lisa Naylor, Manitoba’s minister in charge of emergency management, is imploring all travellers within and from outside the province to reconsider any nonessential travel, as the government requires more hotel rooms for wildfire evacuees.

Federal officials are warning that we could see many more wildifres break out this summer across western Canada, due to hotter and drier conditions linked to global warming.

“Going into the summer, Canada was already experiencing a severe, early wildfire season,” research scientist Bill Merryfield told reporters, noting that the area that has burned so far in 2025 is triple the 10-year average for this point in the year. He said the country is warming at nearly twice the global rate, increasing on average by 1.8 C since 1948, and even more in its northernmost region.

Environment Canada meteorologist Jennifer Smith said large areas of Alberta and British Columbia are predicted to see below-normal levels of precipitation, as are parts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Fumes from the fires have the potential to be carried far and wide by winds toward cities well outside of wildfire zones, Ms. Smith said.

“Smoke can travel thousands of kilometres, turning skies hazy, making the sun more orange or, more seriously, leading to poor air quality right where you live.”

UPDATE July 11th, 2025: Yesterday, the province of Manitoba announced a new state of emergency, as wildfires continue to rage across northern Manitoba, sparking new evacuations (for some people, their second evacuation so far this summer).

My personal and work iPhones have been blaring emergency announcements every few hours, and this morning I woke up to a sky so smoke-filled that the sun is just a barely-visible, pale red dot. I couldn’t sleep, so I came into work this morning at 7:00 a.m., and this is what the sky looks like over the empty parking lot at work:

We have had so many days like this, so far this summer. The Free Press reports:

Manitoba has declared a second provincewide state of emergency, as about 6,000 more evacuees fled their homes Thursday amid the worst wildfire season in at least 30 years.

The convention centre in downtown Winnipeg will become a shelter with enough space for 7,000 evacuees, following mandatory evacuations in Garden Hill Anisininew Nation — where residents were airlifted by the Canadian Armed Forces — and Snow Lake, and precautionary measures in case Thompson residents have to flee…

Kristin Hayward, assistant deputy minister of the Manitoba Wildfire Service, said it is the worst fire season in three decades of electronic record-keeping.

More than one million hectares of land has burned — nearly 11 times the 20-year average of 94,000 hectares — surpassing the record of 720,000 hectares in 2013, she said.

ELEVEN times worse than the average of the past two decades. I wonder if every summer is going to be like this now. Climate change, with its warmer, drier, and more unpedictable weather conditions, are simply making things worse. (One million hectares is equivalent to 2.5 million acres, for you Americans, who are currently suffering under a federal government now hell-bent on denying climate change and dismantling programs to address it.)

Another Free Press article on Friday stated:

Even if you never smoked a cigarette, you basically had at least one on Friday because of dense smoke from wildfires wafting over Winnipeg.

Winnipeg reached its highest smoke particulate count of the season between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. For much of the day, Environment Canada air quality warnings urged everyone to limit time outdoors and reschedule or cancel outdoor sports and activities.

Christopher Pascoe, an associate professor in the department of physiology and pathophysiology at the University of Manitoba, said the city’s particulate count was at 372.6 micrograms per millilitre cubed.

“The current Canadian limit for daily exposure is a total of 27 — that’s 15 times higher than the acceptable daily limit,” Pascoe said.

“At that time, if you were out in it for eight hours, that would have been the equivalent to smoking six and a half cigarettes.”

I feel for the poor people who had to endure all the wildfire smoke at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this weekend!

It makes me wonder what future summers in Manitoba will be like. Is this year a severe outlier, or is this now the new normal?