Northwestern Ontario bore brunt of province's wildfire season with evacuations, outages and a record blaze

Leonard Mamakeesic says he learned a lot during this year's wildfire season after his community was threatened by Ontario's largest wildfire on record.

The chief of Deer Lake First Nation, a remote Oji-Cree community about 600 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay, said his people stepped up to help one another during this summer's evacuation, which saw more than 800 members flown to Toronto.

“The weeks dragged on and on, and the months dragged on and started getting a little rough. People wanted to be home,” Mamakeesic said. “Toronto is a concrete jungle for people” from the community.

The province’s wildfire season officially ended on Friday — a total of 643 wildfires were reported between April and October.

Nearly 600,000 hectares — about 6,000 square kilometres — of land burned, compared to 480 fires and nearly 90,000 hectares, or 900 square kilometres, burned the year before. Ontario’s 10-year average is 712 fires and about 2,100 square kilometres burned.

Nationally, data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre in August indicates Canada's 2025 wildfire season was the second worst on record.

Northwestern Ontario bore the brunt of wildfire activity in the province, with 11 communities facing restrictions or evacuations. Thousands of people from remote First Nations were flown to communities in southern Ontario as well as Winnipeg. 

The region’s largest wildfire, Red Lake 12, peaked at more than 196,000 hectares, becoming Ontario’s largest wildfire on record and prompting evacuations in Deer Lake and Sandy Lake First Nations.

Sandy Lake saw one of the most notable evacuations, where Red Lake 12 triggered a response from the Canadian Armed Forces.

“Fires near human settlements require a really robust response to both fight the fire and to assist the communities in managing an emergency, so how fires affect people is perhaps a better measure of a fire season's severity,” said Chris Marchand, a Dryden-based fire information officer with the Ministry of Natural Resources' Aviation Forest Fire and Emergency Services.

The province says it’s hiring 68 permanent firefighting and support staff positions next year. It also plans to spend more than $500 million on six new De Havilland, DHC-515 waterbombers, but those aren’t expected to arrive until the early 2030s.

“We need pilots and maintenance crews to be able to support those aircraft, so we're actively recruiting, we're looking at ways that we can make compensation as competitive as possible, and working with our partners and government to make that happen,” Ontario Minister of Natural Resources Mike Harris told CBC News in an interview.

The province received additional support from British Columbia and Wisconsin fire crews, as well as aircraft and equipment from Quebec, Alberta and New Brunswick.

In turn, Ontario sent more than 400 fire personnel and six aircraft to British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, as well as Minnesota, according to the ministry.