The fires.
379 wildfires are burning in Canada right now. 246 of them are out of control. The national preparedness level is 1 of 5, and 4,474,173 hectares have burned this year — 44,742 square kilometres, more than an average recent whole year, with the season not over.
A word about the name. This site counts Parliament, and that is not changing. But it is called The Fire Computer, and in a country that now burns like this one does, a computer named fire that kept no watch on the actual fires would be a strange machine. This page is that watch, kept the way the rest of the record is kept: counted, sourced, corrected. It is not an emergency service — if a fire is near you, your province’s wildfire service is the page to have open, not this one.
Every fire burning right now
379 active wildfires as reported by provincial, territorial and federal agencies, on the map projection the federal government draws Canada with. Dot area follows reported fire size; the largest, 2026 ON THU FIRE 036 in Ontario, is 301,240 hectares.
The season
Hectares burned in 2026, cumulative, week by week. The curve is the year happening: flat through winter, and then June.
Hectares burned, cumulative, 2026
The long record
The National Burned Area Composite measures every year since 1972 from satellite imagery rather than agency reports — slower, and consistent across five decades. The worst year in the record is not close: 2023, at 14,796,428 hectares.
Hectares burned per year, 1972–2025
The scars
The same record, drawn where it happened: every fire the satellite composite can outline, 1972 to 2025, on one map. Ink follows the decade — the palest marks are the 1970s, the brightest are now. Six seasons into the 2020s, this decade has burned 32,500,272 hectares; the 2010s, the worst complete decade in the record, needed ten to reach 25,225,187.
Every burn scar since 1972
Where it burns
| Agency | Fires ytd | Hectares ytd | Burning now | Out of control |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northwest Territories | 289 | 1,692,911 | 151 | 143 |
| Quebec | 651 | 753,935 | 41 | 38 |
| Ontario | 789 | 744,486 | 31 | 22 |
| British Columbia | 1,467 | 479,222 | 104 | 5 |
| Saskatchewan | 338 | 292,006 | 1 | 1 |
| Manitoba | 314 | 264,244 | 2 | 2 |
| Parks Canada | 88 | 125,061 | 30 | 17 |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | 130 | 96,303 | — | — |
| Alberta | 760 | 17,742 | — | — |
| Yukon | 80 | 6,245 | 19 | 18 |
| Nova Scotia | 115 | 1,525 | — | — |
| New Brunswick | 355 | 488 | — | — |
| Prince Edward Island | 8 | 4 | — | — |
| Canada | 5,384 | 4,474,173 | 379 | 246 |
An agency is who fights the fire, not quite a province: Parks Canada counts separately, inside whichever province the park is in. The Canada row is the sum of the rows above it, checked at build time against the same API’s own total.
The bill
Everything above this line updates by itself — satellites within days, agency counts within hours. What Canada spends on fire has no feed. Anywhere. These are the numbers that exist:
Method
Live means fetched at build. Like /homes, this page cannot name one snapshot and stand behind it forever; it names the day it asked and exactly what it asked. Numbers on this page age until the next build. The active-fire layer updates intraday; a page built this morning is wrong by tonight, and says so here rather than pretending otherwise.
A fire is what an agency says it is. Counts and sizes are reported by the thirteen fire management agencies, not measured by this site. Reported size lags actual size, especially for fires being monitored rather than fought — which in a bad northern season is most of the burned area.
Two instruments, disclosed. The year-to-date figures are agency reports; the 1972–2025 chart is the satellite-derived National Burned Area Composite. They measure differently and disagree by design; this page never adds one to the other, and the one bar drawn from the wrong instrument is lit and labelled.
The map has no basemap tiles, no zoom, no third-party anything. Coastline is Natural Earth (public domain), projected at build time into the Lambert conformal conic the federal government maps Canada with, decimated to draw at this size. The page you are reading makes no request that leaves this site.
The scar map is the bar chart, drawn in place. The perimeters are the NBAC merged shapefile — 52,610 fire polygons, 1972–2025, published by the Canadian Forest Service in the same Lambert projection this page draws, so they pass through untransformed. A 1.26 GB shapefile becomes 380 kB of path by simplifying at 2 km and again at output resolution, and by not drawing fires smaller than half a pixel — counted and disclosed above, never silently dropped. The polygons’ per-year hectare sums reproduce the annual series to within two hectares, checked at every build: the chart and the map are one instrument twice, and cannot quietly disagree. 411 prescribed burns (177,285 hectares, 0.13% of the total) are in the composite, and therefore on the map.
Sources
- CWFIS active fires — NRCan geoserver WFS, layer
public:cwfif_national_activefires, current revision selected onrecord_end; unfiltered, the layer returns its own history.
geoserver.cwfif.nrcan.gc.ca · Open Government Licence – Canada - Season statistics — NRCan reported-fire-stats API (
/ytd/by-agency,/ytd/by-week,/ytd/by-response-type). Public and keyless but unpublished: it is the backend of ciffc.net, found by reading that site’s JavaScript.api.cwfif.nrcan.gc.ca - Preparedness level — CIFFC national situation
report, 2026-09-22.
api.ciffc.net/v1/sitrep - Burned area 1972–2025 — National
Burned Area Composite summary statistics, version 20260513, CANADA column,
adjusted hectares.
xlsx sha256 9248134616e43740… · vendored in this repo - Spending — NRCan, Cost of wildland fire protection indicator; Parliamentary Budget Officer, Projecting the Cost of the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements Program, October 2025. Hand-curated; there is no feed to poll.
- Burn perimeters — NBAC merged fire polygons, 1972–2025, Canadian Forest
Service. 52,610 features, shipped in the page’s own Lambert
projection; baked to path data by
scars-bake.mjs.
NBAC_1972to2025_20260513_shp.zip · sha256 c42740eb9d2fe399… · 1.26 GB, vendored as baked paths - Coastline — Natural Earth, 1:50m states and provinces, public domain. Fire locations projected with the same parameters (EPSG:3978).