On August 1, 2023, a resident of British Columbia’s North Shuswap region could check Facebook for news about the Bush Creek East wildfire. The next day, they couldn’t.
That was because Meta began stripping Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram, its answer to the federal Online News Act, a policy fight being waged between Ottawa and Silicon Valley. Ten days after the ban, the Bush Creek East wildfire reached its most devastating phase, ultimately destroying more than 270 structures and causing over $240 million in insured damage.
The platform many rural residents relied on for local information had gone quiet at the worst possible moment. In response, UBC Okanagan master’s student Blair Visscher and environmental humanities professor Dr. Greg Garrard are reconstructing how Canadians learn about the fires that upend their lives.
“I would invite everybody—journalists and community members—to consider that all of us are experiencing increased wildfires and drought, and to consider humanizing each other a little bit,” Visscher says. “Empathy goes a long way on both sides.”
Visscher studies sustainability and is among the first to examine Facebook systematically as a wildfire communication platform. Her central findings point to a troubling pattern: the breakdown of trust during the 2023 fire season was years in the making, and Meta’s Canadian news ban severed a lifeline to verifiable news at precisely the moment communities needed it.
UBC Okanagan master’s student Blair Visscher and environmental humanities professor Greg Garrard discuss how wildfire communication has shifted across a decade of major Canadian fires.
Her research examines communications surrounding three wildfires: Fort McMurray in 2016, White Rock Lake in 2021 and Bush Creek East in 2023. Together, the three cases trace a slow erosion of local journalism, institutional trust and the shared sources a community turns to when the sky turns orange.
The Meta Canadian news ban, Visscher says, didn’t cause that erosion so much as intensify it. By 2023, small-town newsrooms had thinned, social feeds had been trained to reward outrage over information, and the removal of credentialed news from Facebook took away one of the last channels rural residents could rely on.
What filled the gap, her analysis found, was conspiracy. Content promoting conspiracy theories made up 16.6 per cent of the Facebook discussion around Bush Creek East, according to Visscher’s research, up from virtually none during the Fort McMurray fire in 2016. The removal of credible news, she argues, did not create that shift on its own, but combined with eroded trust and an algorithm tuned to reward outrage to leave residents with rumour where reporting used to be.
“What was written in local, provincial and national news about these fires was very different from what was being discussed in the community on social media,” she says.
That gap widened into a divide over whose experiences were portrayed sympathetically. Her analysis of 109 news articles found officials accounted for 82 per cent of the voices quoted in Bush Creek East coverage, up from 27 per cent in 2016, while the share of quoted residents and evacuees fell from 30 to 18 per cent.
Blair Visscher has lived in the communities she studies, from Fort McMurray, Alberta, before the 2016 fire to British Columbia’s southern interior, scorched by the White Rock Lake and Bush Creek East fires.
A “community solidarity” frame, present in nearly one-fifth of Fort McMurray coverage, was gone by 2023. That same year, McDougall Creek evacuees near Kelowna were often cast as community-minded and resilient, while North Shuswap residents—some of whom stayed to defend their homes and were involved in confrontations at an RCMP blockade—were framed as reckless, even as saboteurs.
Visscher’s advice, in the meantime, is practical. If officials and communities want updates to be seen on Facebook, they should work with the platform rather than against it.
“We need to bring more emotional resonance into our communication, which can have positive effects,” she says. “When we engage with people in distress with empathy and emotion, more people will see our updates and stories.”
Her research underpins a submission to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and has been presented to Canadian wildfire scientists. As another fire season plays out with the Online News Act and the Meta Canadian news ban still in force, her questions have only grown more urgent.
The point isn’t that residents behaved perfectly or that journalists acted in bad faith, but that a strained system kept making the same move, sorting people into the “deserving” and the “difficult,” and losing the residents’ own perspective along the way.
Further, confrontations at the RCMP blockade weren’t the work of a few individuals, but the predictable result of a community left without reliable information. The cost, Dr. Garrard says, compounds with each fire.
A screenshot of Meta’s June 1, 2023, newsroom post announcing changes to news availability on its platforms in Canada.
“Not acknowledging any harms or breakdown of trust that happened really sets us up for the ongoing distrust that we’re seeing now,” he says.
Dr. Garrard came to wildfire communication from an unlikely direction. His background is in English literature. What drew him to the subject was the chance to apply the tools of the humanities—empathy, close reading, openness to others—somewhere no one expects to find them.
His route was personal. His Canadian stepfather was an Alberta oil engineer who discovered environmentalism in midlife, a path that challenged stereotypes about Alberta oil engineers.
“Even the people you think you know can surprise you,” he says.
Dr. Garrard, for his part, is careful not to end on alarm. He notes that Ottawa is reviewing the Online News Act and that the BC Wildfire Service has adjusted its own communication practices. And he offers a figure he finds genuinely hopeful: whereas roughly half of Americans view their political opponents as dangerous, according to one recent poll, only a fraction of Canadians say the same.
It’s an advantage the country can’t afford to take for granted, he says, pointing to an existing reservoir of trust in one another and in institutions.
“Canadians have a lot to work with,” Dr. Garrard says.
