B.C. Forests Minister Ravi Parmar said on Thursday (May 29) morning that the province has sent about 50 wildland firefighters to Manitoba over the past couple days and is working to send resources to Saskatchewan.
This is in addition to roughly 100 B.C. firefighters in Ontario.
Parmar said the early deployment "speaks to how wildfire seasons have become," and shows why the B.C. wildfire service moved to year-round operations with 600 people employed throughout the year.
"I'm glad that we're in a position here in British Columbia to be able to support our neighbours to the east," he said.
With hot weather hitting B.C. this week — breaking temperature records in places — Parmar said the BC Wildfire Service is still at the ready.
This includes monitoring of expected thunderstorms and overwintering fires in the northeast.
"There's a couple in particular that we've sent some incident management teams to monitor that are growing quite quickly," he said. "They're quite far out and not near major city centres, so we'll keep an eye on them."
