Confessions of a Canadian climate refugee

When people hear the term "climate refugee," most think of huddled masses from impoverished countries driven from their homes by drought and famine. But there are also climate refugees in wealthy countries like Canada. I know because I’m one of them.

Before I left my home in the beautiful Okanagan Valley, we lived on a mountain ridge above the city of Kelowna, across the street from a large regional park full of hiking trails and wildlife, and up the hill from some of Canada’s best wineries. Our lives were filled with outdoor activities, kayaking in mountain lakes, touring the many celebrated wineries, and heading out the front door every morning to walk our dog in Rose Valley Regional Park. But even then, I knew our life in the Okanagan was under threat.

Until 2008, I was the bureau reporter at CBC News in Kelowna and, among other things, I was the lead reporter on the "Summer of Fire" in 2003 that destroyed hundreds of homes in Kelowna and the Thompson Valley around Barriere. The experience, quite literally, is burned into my memory.

The day I began to suspect all the talk of climate change was more than hot air was on Aug. 1, 2003, when I was driving along the Thompson River from Barriere while covering the McLure fire that destroyed more than 70 homes and a number of businesses.

On the way, I spotted a small fire in a rail yard in Kamloops, practically next door to the Kamloops Fire Base. I thought the water bombers would knock the fire out in mere minutes but instead, the fire streaked across the rail yard, got into some grasslands, and as a Rank 6 inferno, roared north toward the town of Rayleigh.

I have been in dozens of fires as a reporter and previously as a firefighter myself, so I have personal knowledge of how fires behave. What I saw that day was like nothing I’d seen before. This fire towered more than a hundred metres high and flowed like liquid over the ground. Trees literally exploded as the fire approached, with tree trunks and debris thrown hundreds of metres into the air, even as helicopters and aircraft tried desperately to drop fire retardant and guide it away from the hundreds of people trapped in Rayleigh.

This was not "normal" fire behaviour. No firefighter I knew had ever seen anything like the fires that burned in Barriere and Rayleigh. Weeks later, the Okanagan Mountain Park fire ignited, destroying another 239 homes.

At the time, it was the worst wildfire in history and since then, the predictions of climatologists have played out with terrifying accuracy in the Okanagan Valley. The frequency of massive, uncontrollable fires has increased to the point where our family was evacuated three times. In 2021, a catastrophic "atmospheric river" destroyed all the highways and roads between Vancouver and the Okanagan Valley. Just like an apocalyptic disaster movie, crowds packed into grocery stores, competing to grab the last canned foods or rolls of toilet paper off the almost-bare shelves.

The heat dome was even worse, as temperatures soared to an unheard of 47 C in Kelowna and 49.3 C in nearby Lytton, which burned to the ground the next day. The heat caused hundreds of deaths in B.C., making it the deadliest weather-related disaster in our history.

Despite all that, it was the fate of the wine grapes that finally convinced us our time in the Okanagan Valley was coming to an end. Before we moved, I was editor of the agricultural magazine Orchard and Vine and in 2022, I learned that 30 to 50 per cent of the entire crop had been destroyed, but worse, many of the vines were also damaged or dead.

I also learned the productivity of wine grapes in the region had been declining steadily for 10 straight years BEFORE the 2022 disaster and the same thing was happening in California, France, Australia, Chile and Argentina, a result of extreme temperatures and wildfires.

The evidence had become overwhelming that the Okanagan Valley is facing a growing environmental catastrophe that threatens the core of its economy, which is based on agriculture, tourism and forestry. Many people, including me, suffered from annual bouts of asthma.

With our kids out of the house and living in Vancouver, we didn’t have any compelling reason to stay in West Kelowna anymore, so we made the hard decision to leave our friends, our beautiful neighbourhood and my wife’s job and flee to the relatively cool climate of the Gulf Islands.

Sadly, our fears of climate catastrophe in the Okanagan are being fully realized. Last year, the largest wildfires in B.C.’s history tore across the province, but particularly through the area where we once lived, which was at the heart of the now infamous McDougall Creek wildfire.

Our old house was not destroyed, but 200 families lost their homes and our beloved Rose Valley Regional Park became a wasteland of blackened, dead trees.

Then, extreme cold set in once again over the winter and this past week, we learned that virtually all the wine grapes in the Okanagan Valley have been lost. While we know the grapes are gone, it is also likely the vast majority of vines are dead or badly damaged, which means the only way the wine industry can recover is through a full replant of the entire region. At best, growers are three years away from seeing another crop, but there is no guarantee new vines will survive, either.

The wineries I visited and wrote about, the families who built them from nothing, the people who work in the wine industry and agri-tourism all face a bleak future. So, I am not the only climate refugee from the Okanagan. I’m just one of the first to move on and seek a life somewhere I hope will be less ravaged by global warming.

For me, those dead grape buds in the Okanagan Valley are Canada’s canary in the coal mine, the graphic warning that true catastrophe awaits us should we fail to win our existential battle against climate change.