Canada Wildfire Webinar:

Reading Wildfire: Community Trust, Social Media, and Why Communities Stopped

Believing Us: Seven Years of Wildfire Communication in Western Canada 

featuring: Blair Visscher and Dr. Greg Garrard

October 16, 0930-1030 MT | 1130 - 1230 ET | REGISTER

​​​

Description:

Between 2016 and 2023, the relationship between wildfire-affected communities and the institutions managing their evacuations deteriorated sharply. In 2023, residents removed firefighting equipment and confronted an RCMP blockade during the Bush Creek East fire, causing the BC Wildfire Service to withdraw personnel from the fire line for their own safety. During this webinar, we will explore how communication systems contributed to that breakdown and what practitioners can do to help prevent this moving forward.

 

Drawing on a comparative study of the Fort McMurray (2016), White Rock Lake (2021), and Bush Creek East (2023) fires, Blair Visscher and Dr. Greg Garrard will discuss their study that analysed news articles and Facebook discourse during these events. Blair and Greg found that while emergency-official voices become more prevalent in news sourcing, resident and evacuee voices became less common and the notion of community solidarity present in early coverage disappeared entirely. On Facebook, community storytelling shifted from solidarity to anger and a consolidated conspiratorial narrative network driven not by fire severity, but by the interaction of platform algorithm changes, pandemic-era institutional distrust, and Meta’s removal of Canadian news content ten days before the Shuswap fires escalated.

 

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for reading community sentiment during an emergency, an understanding of why conventional crisis communication strategies are failing in this information environment, and concrete recommendations for agencies communicating with communities under evacuation.

​

Presenter Bios:

​​Blair Visscher is a doctoral researcher in Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC Okanagan, where she studies wildfire communication, community resilience, and the spread of misinformation during climate emergencies. She completed her MA in 2026 under Dr. Greg Garrard as part of the Eminence-funded Living with Wildfire in the BC Southern Interior research cluster. Her work has been presented at the International Wildland Fire Safety Summit and ASLE UKI, and submitted to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. Blair Visscher | LinkedIn

 

Dr. Greg Garrard is a Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan. He is the author of Ecocriticism (3rd edition, Routledge 2022), co-author of Climate Change Scepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, available open access), and co-editor of Bloomsbury’s Environmental Cultures series. He is Principal Investigator of the Living with Wildfire in the BC Southern Interior research cluster at UBCO and supervised the research presented in this session. Dr. Greg Garrard | Professional Page

 ​

 

​​​​