08/21/2026
🇨🇦 FOUR COUNTRIES. THREE PROVINCES. ONE FIRE LINE.
British Columbia is fighting 116 wildfires right now. Fifty-one of them are burning out of control.
And standing on those fire lines are more than 1,700 firefighters — a large number of whom did not have to be there at all.
Here is who came.
🇲🇽 MEXICO — more than 300
The first 114 landed on August 3. Roughly 100 more followed three days later. The second contingent was sent straight to the Brunswick Complex in the Fraser Canyon.
"Mexico, especially, has been a wonderful partner for us," said Jean Strong of the BC Wildfire Service, noting the many Mexican deployments to Canada over the years.
🇦🇺🇳🇿 AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND — 42
Not only hand crews. This deployment brought Incident Management Team personnel and aviation specialists — the people who run the strategy behind a fire, not just the shovels in front of it.
The BC Wildfire Service thanked them publicly for answering the call.
🇨🇷 COSTA RICA — 102
They arrived on August 13. More than 300 professionals in Costa Rica applied for the roster back in March, and only those who passed the physical exams, the medical reviews and the training checks were selected.
Eight of them are women. Two come from Costa Rica's Indigenous territories. They are booked for 33 days and are due home on September 13.
This is Costa Rica's sixth mission to Canada since 2023. Their three-year total now stands at 542 firefighters sent.
Costa Rica has no standing army. It sent 542 people to fight our fires anyway.
AND CANADIANS SHOWED UP FOR CANADIANS.
🍁 ALBERTA — 66 firefighters arrived July 28. That grew to 186 on the ground, with another 40 deploying, plus two airtankers, two helitankers, a helicopter, and 45 support staff including a full Incident Management Team.
🍁 YUKON — 25 firefighters, arrived July 27.
🍁 QUEBEC — crews sent west.
Premier David Eby thanked the arriving crews and pointed to the partnerships that exist "across borders when communities are facing emergencies."
HOW THIS ACTUALLY WORKS
None of this happens by accident.
There is a small non-profit in Winnipeg called the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre — CIFFC. When a province runs short, it calls CIFFC. CIFFC checks whether any other province can spare crews. If nobody can, it starts calling other countries.
That's it. That's the system. A quiet office on the prairies deciding where every spare crew in the country goes.
And here is the part worth remembering: Canada is usually on the other side of that phone call. B.C. crews have gone to other provinces, to other territories, and to other countries. In January 2025, B.C. sent a wildfire management team to help in Los Angeles.
We help. Then we get helped. That's the arrangement.
Over 13,000 British Columbians are currently receiving emergency support services. It has been one of the largest evacuation efforts in the province's history.
To every crew that got on a plane — from Mexico, from Australia, from New Zealand, from Costa Rica, from Alberta, from Yukon, from Quebec — thank you.
You didn't have to come. You came.
