“We already think we’re teetering into a downturn, and this would just make things worse,” said Tony Stillo, director of economics for Canada at Oxford. “If we were to see these fires really disrupt transportation corridors, disrupting power supply to large population centers, then you’re talking about even worse consequences.”
Estimates of the overall economic drag are built on damage to particular industries, which vary with each disaster.
The recent fires have left some lumber mills idle, for example, as workers have been evacuated. It’s not clear how widespread the damage will be to forest stocks, but provincial governments tend to reduce the amount of timber they allow to be harvested after large blazes, according to Derek Nighbor, chief executive of the Forest Products Association of Canada. Infestations of pine beetles, which have flared up as milder winter temperatures fail to kill off the pests, have curtailed logging in British Columbia.
Although lumber prices have been depressed in recent months as higher interest rates have weighed on home construction, Canada is confronting a housing shortage as it works to bring in millions of new immigrants. Reduced availability of wood will make its housing problem more difficult to solve. “It’s safe to say there’s going to be a supply crunch in Canada as we work through this,” Mr. Nighbor said.
The tourism industry is also being hit, as the fires erupted just as operators were going into the crucial summer season — sometimes far from the fires. Business plunged in the peninsula town of Tofino, a popular destination for whale watching off Vancouver Island, when its only highway access was cut off by a fire two hours away. The road has since reopened, but only one lane at a time, and drivers need to wait up to an hour to get through.
Sabrina Donovan is the general manager of the Pacific Sands Beach Resort and the chair of Tofino’s local tourism promotion organization. She said that her hotel’s occupancy sank to about 20 percent from 85 percent in the course of June, and that few bookings were coming through for the rest of the year. Employers commonly house their staff during the summer, but after weeks without customers, many workers left for jobs elsewhere, making it difficult to maintain full service in the coming months.
