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As wildfires burn across Canada, the struggle to contain the damage has intensified for fire crews. The severe cuts to emergency fire services in recent years, driven by right-wing policies, have led to a failure to prepare for this crisis.

The ill-conceived cuts to emergency fire services have only exacerbated the challenges firefighters are facing in Canada as climate change causes ever more wildfires. (Lance McMillan / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Last week, as wildfires raged across Northern Ontario and smoke billowed south, fire crews struggled to contain the damage. Unfortunately, Canada’s right-wing provincial governments have failed to support these emergency workers in their crucial efforts due to cuts made to emergency fire services. As is so often the case, these cuts were driven by the Right’s relentless pursuit of “efficiencies” within provincial budgets.

In the eyes of Conservative provincial governments, emergency reserves are inefficient. That is, of course, until they’re desperately needed. The ill-conceived cuts to emergency fire services only exacerbated the challenges firefighters faced, further hindering their heroic efforts in battling the flames.

The Damage Done

Last week, across Canada, and much of the northeast United States, cities were surrounded by orange skies and apocalyptic plumes. Nova Scotia experienced a staggering escalation in its fire season. The record-breaking destruction of 3,390 hectares witnessed last year has been eclipsed by an even more devastating 22,000 hectares this year. In Quebec, over one hundred fires burned over 900,000 hectares. Ontario witnessed a significant surge in wildfires compared to the previous year. The number of wildfires doubled from 2022, while the area consumed by these fires soared from just over 2,000 hectares to a total of over 33,000 hectares. And, in Alberta and British Columbia, the fires have set new records. As the BBC observed: “Fires across Canada have already burned an area that’s 12 times the 10-year average for this time of year.”

All told, over one hundred thousand people have been forced to flee their homes. According to The Washington Post, should the fires continue to rage at their current pace the country will suffer the worst wildfire season in its recorded history and many more people will be displaced. “It is, in a word, sobering,” Canada’s natural resources minister Jonathan Wilkinson said.

In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, the ministry of natural resources said, over the weekend, that there are sixty-eight wildfires burning across the north of the province. Evacuation orders have been issued across northern communities already and the anticipated rainfall, according to experts, is not expected to calm the fires.

Assigning Blame

Wildfires are stochastic — they are unpredictable and random. With forests covering roughly one-third of Canada’s landmass and a larger share of Ontario’s landmass, they happen and will continue to happen. But as climate change leads to increasingly hot and dry temperatures, they increase in frequency and intensity. As Nature summarized it recently: “Hot, dry weather and human carelessness have led to a huge burnt area — and to a choking haze that is affecting millions of people.”

Human carelessness often gives rise to wildfires, typically in the form of negligent campfires, smokers, and the like. Arguably, however, a much bigger factor in the recent spate of disastrous wildfires has been the utter carelessness of right-wing governments and the wealthy interests they represent.

Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, blames campfires for the fire. But, as the opposition has noted, his government cut the province’s emergency firefighting budget by 67 percent — or $142.2 million in 2019 — and never restored the funding.

Ontario isn’t alone in this. In Alberta, cuts have been similar. The United Conservative Party government cut the wildfire budget from $130 million in 2018–19 to $100 million this year.

Even British Columbia’s nominally left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) government has been remiss in wildfire preparation. Although the government spent $801 million fighting forest fires in 2021’s summer wildfire emergency, this year the NDP budgeted only $32 million dollars for the permanent service.

Federally, too, budget cuts implemented by the 1990s Liberal government, as part of one of the deepest austerity programs in the industrialized world, also shrank the Canadian Forest Service’s staff size — from twenty-two hundred in the 1990s to seven hundred today. “People were mortified,” Edward Struzik, a fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen’s University, told the New York Times. “We have this situation that’s unfolding, this new fire paradigm, and the forest service’s just getting chump change to address it.”

All told, owing to past cuts, more than eleven hundred firefighters from around the world have been dispatched across Canada to help combat the country’s raging fire season. This including groups from France, Chile, Costa Rica, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Climate Change and Canada’s Forests

While the fires raged across Northern Ontario, forcing communities to evacuate, Ford denied any link between the crisis and climate change. “I’m actually in shock that the Leader of the Opposition is politicizing wildfires. It’s staggering, really,” Ford said. “But nothing surprises me with the opposition.”

Regardless of whether Ford acknowledges it, there exists a positive feedback loop between climate change and forest fires. Each fire releases the sequestered carbon from Canada’s vast forests, further exacerbating the impact of climate change.

Environment and Climate Change Canada have found that, from 2001–2016. Canada’s forests acted as “more as a source than a sink” of carbon. In British Columbia, the province’s extreme fire years, in 2017 and 2018 alone, each produced three times more greenhouse gases than all other sectors of the province combined.

“People sometimes say, ‘Is this the new normal?’ And the answer is unequivocally this is not the new normal,” says Werner Kurz, a senior research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service said. “We’re on a trajectory of continuously worsening situations due to climate change.”

“Our emission reduction targets literally go up in smoke as a result of these wildfires,” he warns.

Elsewhere, researchers have observed a concerning trend: fires are causing lasting impacts on the composition of Canada’s boreal forests. The destruction of black spruce trees through burning is hindering their ability to regenerate and recover. Increasingly, as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) put it, wildfires are transforming these winter forests into savannas, with huge implications for biodiversity and carbon storage.

Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, told CBC News:

I would anticipate that what we’re seeing now is going to play out as really severe burning fires. […] We know that when a lot of organic matter — in the trees, but also on the ground in moss and peat layers — when a large amount of that is consumed during a fire, sites don’t regenerate back to what they were prior.

The Problem of Externalities

Ford’s failure to prepare Ontario for the current disaster is unsurprising. He is, after all, the same premier who vowed to do all he could to open up Ontario’s carbon-rich “Ring of Fire” — the mineral-rich peatland’s in the north of the province. Despite the sensitivity of the region, Ford is committed to developing it, vowing that, “If I have to hop on a bulldozer myself, we’re going to start building roads to the Ring of Fire.”

The premier has also worked with housing developers to expand construction into the province’s “greenbelt,” which serves as another massive carbon sink. In between, Ford has been actively cutting funding for health care, housing, and other vital social services, thereby increasing the vulnerability of working individuals and placing them at greater risk in the face of future crises.

The federal Liberal government, while paying lip service to the dangers of climate change, is little better in this regard. While doing all it can to greenwash its policies, for example, it has promoted massive offshore drilling projects, doled out ever-increasing subsidies to the country’s oil bosses and maintained roughly comparable cuts to federal emergency services.

In the lead up to the wildfires, Ford promised to find “efficiencies” in the public sector. In practice that has and will continue to mean cutting programs to reduce the “tax burden” on corporate profits. In the eyes of Ford and his party, it is too costly to maintain reserve funds “in case” of emergencies because those come at the expense of profit.

Notably, Ford has successfully garnered the support of the mining and construction industry leaders in the province. The shortsighted, profit-first calculus employed by Ford and his party jeopardizes the province’s ability to effectively respond to emergencies, such as the wildfires, leaving communities vulnerable and highlighting the prioritization of corporate interests over public welfare.

The urgency of combating wildfires in Canada necessitates a collective effort to challenge austerity measures and the erosion of essential public services, such as well-equipped and well-staffed firefighting teams and other emergency services. The preservation of robust public goods and community safety should take precedence over short-term gains. The last several weeks have vividly underscored the dire consequences that arise from neglecting these priorities, providing us with a stark glimpse into the potential nightmare that can ensue.

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Ever since the German armor’s debacle, Washington DC and London have been strangely quiet about their previously boastful pledge to send the “Abrams” and “Challenger 2” MBTs. Especially now when German manufacturers are facing plummeting stocks and market share losses. We can only guess who will benefit the most from filling the gap.

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Dorothy Thompson’s work on Chartism secured her reputation as one of the finest Marxist historians Britain has produced. She displayed a particular sensitivity to gender issues and encouraged creative dialogue between Marxist and feminist currents.

Illustration of the Newport Rising on November 4, 1839. Chartists and sympathizers marched on the town of Newport, (Monmouthshire, Wales) to liberate fellow Chartists who had been taken prisoner in the Westgate Hotel. From British Rebels and Reformers, published by William Collins of London, 1942, p. 39 (Culture Club / Bridgeman via Getty Images)

Dorothy Thompson, née Towers (1923–2011), known to her friends as Dotty, was a highly distinctive person and historian. She was a prominent member of the Communist Party Historians Group in Britain, which included such renowned figures as Christopher Hill, John Saville, and Eric Hobsbawm.

After leaving the Communist Party in response to the invasion of Hungary in 1956, she was active in Britain’s New Left and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Teaching history for many years at the University of Birmingham, she established a reputation as the leading historian of the nineteenth-century Chartist movement, publishing a series of books and essays on the subject.

This brief appreciation assesses Dorothy Thompson’s contribution to what can be termed the “Thompsonian project.” Of course, no such schema ever existed in any official sense. Yet Dorothy shared for most of her adult life a great emotional, physical, and intellectual partnership with her fellow historian Edward Thompson (1924–1993).

A Joint Odyssey

He too was utterly distinctive. The charismatic Edward Palmer Thompson, who published as E. P. Thompson to differentiate himself from his father, echoed his literary parent by remaining a rather old-fashioned man of letters: writing poetry, letters, and a novel. But he was more prolific and much more of a polymath. Thus E. P. Thompson became an outstanding historian, public intellectual, socialist theoretician, and peace campaigner.

Dorothy Thompson established a reputation as the leading historian of the nineteenth-century Chartist movement.

Edward and Dorothy wed in 1948, after the speedy ending of her first marriage. There followed a joint personal and intellectual odyssey. He cannot have been easy to live with, as Edward often had volcanic shifts in moods and political hopes. At times, he joyously predicted the regeneration of the Left. At many other times, he darkly foresaw the coming apocalyptic devastation of the Left and the destruction of human rights.

He polemicized urgently, both publicly and in private letters. The Hegelian dialectic of rejecting the views of a named individual helped E. P. Thompson to clarify his own thoughts. However, the recipients of his wrath did not always appreciate it. He thus made friends with ease but also shed various political allies on the Left.

Often, for all his charisma, fame, and international networks of friends, Edward Thompson was intellectually a lonely figure. After he quit his post at Warwick University in 1971, he remained a freelancer, albeit punctuating his time with some teaching fellowships in the United States. His working life was solitary, based at the Thompsons’ grand house at Wick Episcopi, outside Worcester. This relative isolation made a sharp contrast to his early teaching for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) in Halifax, and to the urban environs of Cheltenham, which followed Halifax.

Throughout all these permutations, Dorothy Thompson was steadfast. Her notable inner calm was a powerful and necessary antidote to Edward’s turbulence. The marriage itself was not without inner tensions at times. What personal alliance is not? Indeed, how many relationships with E. P. Thompson could remain entirely tranquil? But the personal loyalties and intellectual partnership of the Thompsons never faltered.

What they were trying to do was both to write and to live a left-wing political commitment. Dorothy’s chosen form for writing was history. Edward’s included history, but his remit also extended to socialist theorizing, political commentary, and literary works.

Writing and Campaigning

Especially over time, they became strongly committed to writing their histories to a rigorous professional standard. E. P. Thompson was galvanized by reactions to his best-selling The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He got what he called a “generous but critical reception in the academic press.” Five years later, he added a detailed postscript to Making’s second edition, in which he conceded a number of points while firmly reiterating his overall case.

Dorothy and Edward Thompson wanted to write robust left-wing history that would withstand professional criticism.

After that, he once told me, he was determined to make his intellectual position as professionally watertight as possible. Dorothy, who always wrote more slowly and painstakingly, strongly concurred. They disdained “mere”’ historical propaganda. What they wanted to write was robust left-wing history that would withstand professional criticism.

Equally, both were simultaneously committed to grassroots activism, campaigning in left-wing politics within Britain and in the pan-European movement for nuclear disarmament (European Nuclear Disarmament, END) between 1982 and 1991. It was an intensive lifestyle commitment, which, incidentally, put considerable pressure upon their writing time.

All this, while the Thompsons were bringing up three lively children. And then, once they were grown, Dorothy Thompson was working as an academic in the History Department at Birmingham University. Again, it was her inner calm, plus her resolute efficiency, that proved to be bedrock qualities for them both.

Above all, the Thompsons were committed to their lives of writing and campaigning within an evolving Marxist framework. They were not just left-wingers. They were, at first, joyously partisan members of the Communist Party. After 1956, when they resigned their membership, they continued to seek for a noncommunist Marxism.

They had a tolerant but distinctly dismissive attitude to “comrades” who worked within the Labour Party. Their aim, as articulated primarily by Edward Thompson, was to update and humanize Marxism. They believed that it would grow as an ideology.

Marxism should, they argued, eradicate its conceptual and organizational weaknesses but retain its core values. In that way, the Thompsons hoped to live within the flowering of a truly revolutionary zeitgeist, which they hoped also to influence.

Hare and Tortoise

To these tasks, Edward Thompson brought his originality as a thinker, his determination to pursue arguments through to the end, and his immense passion. He was both a historian and a Marxist theoretician. Meanwhile, Dorothy Thompson, like other friends among the Marxist historians (such as Christopher and Bridget Hill), was not at all interested in writing anything that might be dubbed “theory.”

Dorothy Thompson was not at all interested in writing anything that might be dubbed ‘theory.’

She was quick to decide upon other people’s intellectual standpoints. Indeed, she could be quite sharp in verbal confrontations. Yet she resolutely steered clear of both abstraction and polemics in her writing.

Furthermore, Dorothy often declared that her gifts as a historian were inferior to those of Edward. She was not as original as he; and she did not resent it. So there was no direct competition between them. Edward had “theory” to himself, and led the way in “history.” The public fame — and the criticism and opprobrium — came to him.

If there was an element of unintended competition, it appeared in terms of their respective speeds of writing. Dorothy was always the tortoise. She struggled, while he wrote not only rapidly but with great linguistic versatility. The contrast must sometimes have been galling for her.

Nonetheless, she persevered. And once she had produced her big book in 1984, entitled The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution, she relaxed. By then, she was sixty. She and he both knew what she could achieve. The partnership had worked intellectually for her as well as for him.

Duty of Discontent

So what were Dorothy Thompson’s specific contributions to the Thompsonian project, since their aims were conjoint? One answer must be her continual and unflappable inner calm, which had an intellectual as well as personal bearing upon their work.

E. P. Thompson’s mental world was volcanic in its explosive power, with a marked strand of melodrama. Dorothy’s steadiness provided calm and ballast. As the two of them continually discussed history, politics, and Marxism, she was the down-to-earth questioner and critic on the hearth, while he exploded with ideas.

Fittingly, Dorothy’s students named the Festschrift published in her honor The Duty of Discontent.

One example bears repetition. In E. P. Thompson’s study entitled Whigs and Hunters (1975), he wrote about an egregious example of eighteenth-century class-biased legislation. The book then ended with a final section discussing the rule of law generically.

A simple reader might have expected to find a denunciation of the legal system as class-based and oppressive. Yet E. P. Thompson instead offered a ringing endorsement of the rule of law — individual bad laws and poorly functioning court systems notwithstanding. Both Edward and Dorothy separately told me that this section was prompted by Dorothy’s probing.

She felt that a duty to challenge was part of her dissenting (Huguenot) heritage. It was very much her teaching style too. She sought to prod people to thought, not to create cloned followers. Fittingly, therefore, her students named the Festschrift published in her honor The Duty of Discontent.

Needless to say, Edward returned the compliment by critiquing Dorothy’s work in turn. Their joint distillation from his fizz and her quizzical questioning worked intellectually for them both.

Gender and History

A second key element that Dorothy brought to their project was her sensitivity to gender issues. Both the Thompsons were committed to bringing empathy into their study of the past. They hated arid Marxist doctrines, just as they disliked the impersonal trends invoked by economic historians or sociologists. All such abstractions made no reference to real historical people.

A second key element that Dorothy brought to their project was her sensitivity to gender issues.

Hence their joint credo was encapsulated by E. P. Thompson. He wrote, in a much-quoted phrase in the preface to The Making of the English Working Class, that his aim was to rescue the unknown and often despised radicals, protesters, and eccentrics of history “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Dorothy strongly agreed. Nonetheless, it was obvious from his writings that Edward Thompson was chiefly interested in the male artisan workforce and, particularly, in men like John Thelwall, who were active radical campaigners.

It was not a case of misogyny. Edward Thompson was not one of those fusty male scholars who seriously dislike women. He was a decided feminist. He also enjoyed the company of women and expected much from them. Quite possibly, it was the pressure of his expectations that weighed upon Dorothy, when she began her own academic career and was struggling to write.

Yet Edward Thompson’s historical focus was chiefly upon men. And it was not their “masculinity” that preoccupied him. He was completely uninterested in questions of “identity,” which have recently been very fashionable among historians. Edward’s focus was always upon ideas and the struggle between classes. That for him was the central dynamic, which he sought to explore historically.

By contrast, Dorothy Thompson was genuinely interested in questions of gender. She was generally sympathetic to the so-called “second-wave” feminism in the later 1960s and ’70s. And she enjoyed reading and debating works like Hidden From History, by her younger friend Sheila Rowbotham.

Feminism and History

It is important to stress, however, that Dorothy was not a feminist hard-liner. She did not accept that all women constituted a separate “class,” with a common interest against all men. Nor was she an “essentialist,” believing in essential differences between the male and female of the human species. For her, economic divisions were more socially powerful than were shared gender identities.

Dorothy’s book on Chartism paid careful attention not only to labor history, but also to the roles played by women.

Indeed, the Guardian in the early 1970s once featured a debate between Dorothy Thompson and Sheila Rowbotham on precisely that point. The exchange was amicable. There remained, however, a bedrock difference. Economic class, for the Thompsons, always trumped other alignments.

Having said that, Dorothy became something of a mediator between feminism and Marxism. Thus, her book on Chartism paid careful attention not only to labor history, but also to the roles played by women, as it did to the contributions of other “outsiders” such as the Irish.

She did not endorse a postmodernist preoccupation with identity as purely socially constructed. Dorothy always remained far too much of a materialist for that. Yet her angle of vision was wide, and her interest in cultural and gender history grew increasingly eclectic. So it was less of a surprise than it initially seemed that Dorothy’s next book was a study of Queen Victoria, subtitled Gender and Power.

The interesting cross-tensions between femininity and monarchism, wifely submission and presidential primacy — all experienced by a woman at the top of the class structure — were expertly explored. Ultimately, Queen Victoria appeared as more of a conservative/monarch than she was a female/innovator. No startling revelation here.

Nor had Dorothy expected to find one. It was the detailed analysis of how class and gender intersected that was of historical interest, contributing an important new element into the Thompsonian oeuvre.

Grounded History

Third and last — in addition to her quizzical questioning and her gender awareness — Dorothy Thompson provided an unflagging emphasis upon “grounded” history. Her mantra was “back to the archive.” All theory, from whatever perspective, was to be tested against the evidence.

Dorothy Thompson provided an unflagging emphasis upon ‘grounded’ history. Her mantra was ‘back to the archive.’

This viewpoint has for some years been coming back into favor. Dorothy would have agreed that a “pure” empiricism is impossible. The facts don’t “speak for themselves,” and a simple narrative of events would be nothing more than antiquarianism — indeed, positively unfair to antiquarians.

Yet reliance upon “pure” theory or abstract proposition, untested by historical evidence, was highly dangerous in the other direction. If historians already knew what they were going to find, then empirical research was wasted effort.

The answer was a constant dialectic between theory and evidence. Dorothy Thompson never argued this position theoretically. She simply enacted it, via her work as a teacher and scholar. In terms of studying the history of the Left, a “grounded,” source-based approach meant acknowledging the failures as well as successes of radical movements.

It equally entailed analyzing the fissures within the working class, as well as their potential solidarity. The aim was a rounded portrait, with the “ideal” and the “material” worlds intertwined.

Ultimately, indeed, the research-based Thompsonian project led both the Thompsons to modify their Marxism. In 1956, they left the British Communist Party. E. P. Thompson then polemicized against Louis Althusser’s depersonalized model of structural Marxism. Instead, the Thompsonian project envisaged a humanist Marxism (sometimes called “cultural Marxism”).

Living the Journey

Yet both Dorothy and Edward found, by the end, that their quondam materialist approach was being steadily leavened into a broader holistic history. In his later years, Edward noted wryly that, when confronted by anti-Marxists, he defended Marxism, firmly. Yet when he met orthodox Marxists, he denounced them, angrily.

They were neither fully in nor fully out. In some ways, they were “post-Marxist.” They had evolved into liberal humanists with a continuing sympathy for life’s underdogs. Yet that seemed too vague. In fact, they never stabilized an alternative basis for a progressive “left” history.

Nor were they alone in facing such dilemmas. From the mid-1970s onward, the Left across Europe and in the United States found itself in political and theoretical disarray. Labor history became unfashionable. And Marxism as an ideology was hollowing out, damaged by its major flaws in practical application as well as by its theoretical rigidities.

The Thompsons often despaired at the zeitgeist. On the other hand, while they struggled with the outcomes, they lived the journey with passion and commitment — every inch of the way.