https://irrationalfear.substack.com/p/climate-lockdowns
DR. MATTHEW WIELICKI
Excerpt:
This month, Canadians learned that a walk in the woods could cost more than a speeding ticket. Nova Scotia barred hiking, biking, fishing, and even picnics on forested land and advertised fines up to $25,000 for violators.
New Brunswick shut the public out of Crown land for “safety.” Newfoundland and Labrador warned of steep penalties and even possible jail time for fire rule violations.
One viral case even showed a protester being hit with a five-figure fine for stepping into the woods, reported here.
The sweeping controls are sold as science, yet the long-term wildfire data do not show a national, CO₂-driven escalation. Canada’s own databases show big swings year to year, a record spike in 2023, and very quiet seasons… including an exceptionally low 2020. That is not a steady climate signal; it is variability.
The playbook, reused
During COVID, officials closed beaches and parks for your safety.
Now the same reflex is being applied to forests. Banning hiking and picnics does not thin fuels, harden towns, or fix power line ignitions. It manages people, not risk. The result is months of restrictions on ordinary life, justified by a storyline that collapses the complexity of wildfire into a single variable, atmospheric CO₂.
The provincial reality, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick
Nova Scotia. The count of fires has trended down since the early 1990s, while the area burned is usually modest, with rare spikes. The big bar in 2023 is the exception, not the rule. Look back through the record, and you will see many quiet years where both the number of fires and the area burned stayed low. In other words, an outlier season does not equal a new normal. You can explore the official series here: National Forestry Database and the federal roll-up here: Canadian National Fire Database.
This is the climate crisis in a nutshell
Take advantage of every natural disaster to advance an agenda, despite observable data that says otherwise. That is the pattern. During COVID, temporary controls became muscle memory. Climate provides the permanent justification. There is no vaccine to declare the emergency over, only a rolling mandate to sacrifice convenience, then freedoms, to an amorphous planetary good.
