Canadian forest fires choke much of North America

**Gideon Long** (0:03)
Forest fires, hitting businesses on both sides of the US-Canadian border.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
It's wild, because when you look outside, you think it's fog, and it's completely covered the city, and it's smoke.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:12)
It's almost like smoking cigarettes all day without even having to go get new ports, man, this is insane, bro.

**Gideon Long** (0:18)
It's World Business Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Gideon Long, looking at the economic impact of the latest fires in North America. Plus, Netflix shares plunge after it misses its growth forecasts, and is oil heading back towards $100 a barrel.
Canada is used to wildfires, but in recent years, they've become more severe and they're lasting longer. Quite apart from the pain for Canadians caught up in them, they're having major economic impacts too. This week, Toronto's air quality was officially registered as the worst in the world, and the smoke has been drifting across the border, affecting people and businesses in the United States as well.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:02)
We begin tonight here with the breaking news, growing concern at this hour over air quality, dangerous smoke from Canadian wildfires filling the skies across the US.

**Gideon Long** (1:10)
Here are residents of Chicago, a full 450 kilometres south of the Canadian border.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:15)
It's wild because when you look outside, you think it's fog and it's completely covered the city, and it's smoke because when you walk outside, it burns, it stings a little bit.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:23)
It's almost like smoking cigarettes all day without even having to go get new ports, man. This is insane, bro.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:28)
Why is this continuing to happen? It's like I don't remember this growing up, that we had smoke and fires so often.

**Gideon Long** (1:35)
Well, Stuart Bergman is the chief economist of Export Development Canada, and he joins me now. Stuart, as I say, wildfires not new in Canada. You're used to them, but we are seeing a trend for them to be more widespread almost every summer. Just run us through what the impact is on Canadian businesses.

**Stuart Bergman** (1:53)
Sure. Thanks for having me get in. Well, like many economies around the world, Canada is adapting to a new reality where climate related events like wildfires, also floods and other extreme weather events are becoming reoccurring economic factors rather than just isolated incidents. Now, I will say at this point, I'm just speaking to the economic cost rather than the enormous human toll that these events take, which I think also needs to be acknowledged.
But the challenge then isn't just responding to individual disasters, but rather building resilience into our infrastructure, our supply chains, our economic planning.

**Gideon Long** (2:33)
And I've just been looking at some of the images coming out of Canada and from Toronto in particular. In the air, you can see the thick smoke in the air. As we said, Toronto has registered the worst air quality in the world this week. Give us a sense of what that means for workers who have to be outside, some workers, when the air quality is so poor.
Or even air quality for workers indoors, for that matter. What measures are they taking? Have they been instructed to take measures or are they just kind of doing it off their own bat?

**Stuart Bergman** (3:00)
Yeah, oftentimes, you know, there are instructions that are put out for, you know, citizens to stay inside, to avoid doing any strenuous activity outdoors.
And again, this is part and parcel of the costs that we're counting up as we look at the sort of, again, the economic costs, right? We know that the impact of wildfires are becoming much more expensive, even if the number of fires, as you said earlier, isn't necessarily increasing as a result of better prevention. But the severity of fires has risen drastically, thanks to hotter temperatures, longer dry seasons. So when we look at these economic costs, I sort of put them in a number of categories, including the costs obviously associated with physical damage. So property and insurance costs, you got the costs of lost economic output, tourism losses, trade and supply chain disruptions. But then there's the broader economic costs that are harder to spot or let's say harder to quantify, including like some of the things you're referring to, like reduced productivity from smoke exposure, increased healthcare expenditures, general business interruptions, community displacements, and certainly a reduction in attractiveness for foreign investment and for tourism. And these indirect costs are generally significantly under measure.

**Gideon Long** (4:22)
And I know this is very difficult to do, but can you put any dollar figures on those costs for how much this is actually costing?