What a mandate would actually reach, and why the money to help is getting harder to get
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With hundreds of structures burned across British Columbia this season and weeks left in the peak of it, the question of whether FireSmart should stay voluntary has moved from a conference panel to the news. CBC News reported on August 16, 2026 that wildland fire researchers and FireSmart program staff are calling for the program's principles to be made mandatory for homeowners and builders in high-risk areas. The argument is not that homeowners are careless. It is that ember-driven ignition does not respect property lines.
Running underneath that debate is a money problem. The province has put more than $175 million into FireSmart since 2018. By February of this year, $25 million was left, allocated through a competitive intake that has since closed. A one-time top-up followed in the spring budget. What has not followed is a commitment to keep the program funded year over year.
For anyone who owns a home in or near a wildfire-exposed area, those two stories are the same story. One decides what you may eventually be required to do. The other decides whether there is public money to help you do it. This piece covers what is confirmed, what is proposed, and what a homeowner can reasonably watch for — not what to buy or how to retrofit.
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FireSmart is a national program that teaches property owners how to reduce the chance a wildfire ignites their home, and it funds retrofits and building upgrades through participating communities. Rachel Woodhurst, a FireSmart program lead based in Salmon Arm, describes the principles to CBC News as "giving your property the best chance to still be standing when you return." Her list starts where it costs nothing: cleaning your gutters, keeping your lawn short, making sure your roof does not have debris, and choosing what you landscape with.
The landscaping point is where a lot of B.C. yards run into trouble. Juniper and cedar hedging are popular for shade and privacy and are also highly flammable, which makes deciduous planting the safer option in fire-prone areas. The program also recommends spacing trees out to slow fire spread, pruning branches to a two-metre clearance from the ground, keeping firewood and fuel away from homes and sheds, and adding garden sprinklers or roof-watering systems.
None of this is improvised. The province's FireSmart Begins at Home manual divides the property into measured bands radiating out from the house, and every rebate schedule and draft bylaw in the province is built on those same bands. Knowing them is the difference between "make my yard safer" and knowing exactly which two metres matter most.
Two things follow from that table. The measures closest to the house are the cheapest and the most consequential, and they are almost entirely maintenance. The expensive measures — non-combustible roofing and siding, replacing established hedging — sit in the same framework but in a completely different budget category.
Our wildfire season preparation checklist walks through the seasonal version of this work in more detail.
FireSmart is a national program that teaches property owners how to reduce the chance a wildfire ignites their home, and it funds retrofits and building upgrades through participating communities. Rachel Woodhurst, a FireSmart program lead based in Salmon Arm, describes the principles to CBC News as "giving your property the best chance to still be standing when you return." Her list starts where it costs nothing: cleaning your gutters, keeping your lawn short, making sure your roof does not have debris, and choosing what you landscape with.
The landscaping point is where a lot of B.C. yards run into trouble. Juniper and cedar hedging are popular for shade and privacy and are also highly flammable, which makes deciduous planting the safer option in fire-prone areas. The program also recommends spacing trees out to slow fire spread, pruning branches to a two-metre clearance from the ground, keeping firewood and fuel away from homes and sheds, and adding garden sprinklers or roof-watering systems.
None of this is improvised. The province's FireSmart Begins at Home manual divides the property into measured bands radiating out from the house, and every rebate schedule and draft bylaw in the province is built on those same bands. Knowing them is the difference between "make my yard safer" and knowing exactly which two metres matter most.
Two things follow from that table. The measures closest to the house are the cheapest and the most consequential, and they are almost entirely maintenance. The expensive measures — non-combustible roofing and siding, replacing established hedging — sit in the same framework but in a completely different budget category.
Our wildfire season preparation checklist walks through the seasonal version of this work in more detail.
The headline number is easy to misread. It is not an annual budget. According to the Union of B.C. Municipalities, which administers the program on the province's behalf, more than $175 million has flowed to FireSmart since 2018, and an estimated $25 million remained for the intake that opened on February 2, 2026. That is a closing balance, not a yearly allowance.
It also came with a narrower menu. Funding for fuel management is no longer available, and neither is funding for the impacts of wildfires. Requests were capped at one-year projects, and the program shifted from open intake to a competitive adjudicated process with all applications due in full by April 30, 2026.
The allocation rule deserves precision. The money is not handed out on the basis of who is most at risk in some assessed sense — applications are screened for eligibility and then scored on alignment with the intent of the funding, merit and priority. Communities compete for it.
For scale, The Tyee reported the program had been distributing roughly $40 million a year in recent years and supporting about 100 FireSmart coordinators across the province. Ashcroft Mayor Barbara Roden put the consequence bluntly, warning the contraction "really has the potential of having a huge negative impact on the small, rural communities on the frontline of wildfire." Those are the communities where the program does the most work per dollar.
The picture moved after February, and it is worth being exact about how far. Budget 2026 added $15 million to the FireSmart Community Funding and Supports program within a $30 million wildfire package, with Forests Minister Ravi Parmar framing it as investing in "local governments, contractors and First Nations to mitigate the risks of wildfire."
What that $15 million buys is the part worth holding onto. The Chilliwack Progress reported it would let roughly 75 additional communities access funding, capped at $200,000 each. UBCM president Cori Ramsay's response was the tell: "Fifteen million [dollars] is better than zero, but it's not what we were hoping for."
So the honest reading is a top-up rather than a renewal. It is well below the annual run rate the program had been operating at, it does not establish multi-year funding, and Parmar has said the province is reconsidering how the program should be funded at all — that he needs to ensure it is "meeting the needs of communities." Government has not walked away. It has also not committed.
The insurance industry has noticed the gap and is lobbying on it, as we covered when insurers asked B.C. to fund resilience in its 2027 budget.
Here is the mechanism most coverage skips, and it is the one that determines whether any of this reaches your bank account.
You cannot apply for FireSmart Community Funding and Supports. The program provides funding to local governments and First Nations to increase community resiliency, and those are the only eligible applicants — a point the program's own eligibility page makes plainly. Homeowner rebates exist downstream of it. Your regional district or municipality wins provincial money, then runs a rebate program with it.
The province confirms the chain directly: rebates of up to $5,000 covering 50 per cent of project cost are available to homeowners, but only after a Home Ignition Zone Assessment by a Local FireSmart Representative or an assessment through the Wildfire Mitigation Program, and the funding for those rebates flows to participating First Nations, municipalities and regional districts through the same community program. The BC Wildfire Service sets out the assessment-first sequence.
What rationing looks like in practice is visible in the terms themselves, which now vary sharply between neighbouring jurisdictions:
The Regional District of Central Kootenay states its current funding is confirmed through 2026 and that future program availability has not yet been announced. Same province, same program, materially different odds depending on the address — and a window that closes when the money runs out rather than on a fixed date. These are illustrative examples rather than a provincial survey; terms differ everywhere.
That is the practical meaning of a funding squeeze. It does not arrive as a headline. It arrives as a closed intake.
Here is the mechanism most coverage skips, and it is the one that determines whether any of this reaches your bank account.
You cannot apply for FireSmart Community Funding and Supports. The program provides funding to local governments and First Nations to increase community resiliency, and those are the only eligible applicants — a point the program's own eligibility page makes plainly. Homeowner rebates exist downstream of it. Your regional district or municipality wins provincial money, then runs a rebate program with it.
The province confirms the chain directly: rebates of up to $5,000 covering 50 per cent of project cost are available to homeowners, but only after a Home Ignition Zone Assessment by a Local FireSmart Representative or an assessment through the Wildfire Mitigation Program, and the funding for those rebates flows to participating First Nations, municipalities and regional districts through the same community program. The BC Wildfire Service sets out the assessment-first sequence.
What rationing looks like in practice is visible in the terms themselves, which now vary sharply between neighbouring jurisdictions:
The Regional District of Central Kootenay states its current funding is confirmed through 2026 and that future program availability has not yet been announced. Same province, same program, materially different odds depending on the address — and a window that closes when the money runs out rather than on a fixed date. These are illustrative examples rather than a provincial survey; terms differ everywhere.
That is the practical meaning of a funding squeeze. It does not arrive as a headline. It arrives as a closed intake.
Three communities show the range of outcomes when fireproofing moves from advice to rule.
Logan Lake is the proof of concept. After being threatened by fire in 2003, the district undertook intense local mitigation and became Canada's first FireSmart community, and it credited that work with saving homes from a 2021 fire that came within feet of houses.
Jasper is the working mandate. After the July 2024 wildfire destroyed 30 per cent of the townsite, the municipality adopted new urban design standards requiring homes to be built with non-combustible roofs and siding instead of cedar shingles. Fire chief Mathew Conte told CBC News that "a lot of the homes that still had cedar shake roofs" were where crews were hit hardest, with ember showers reigniting structures faster than they could be put out.
The scope of Jasper's rule matters more than the rule itself. It binds new construction. Owners of existing cedar roofs are being encouraged — not required — to switch to non-combustible materials such as tin and asphalt. Even the country's most decisive fireproofing mandate did not reach into the standing housing stock.
Lytton is the cautionary case. After its 2021 wildfire the village initially adopted bylaws requiring fireproofing measures, then rescinded them over concerns about cost and potential delays. A rebuilding community discovered that stricter requirements and a fast, affordable rebuild pull against each other.
The instinct is to assume "mandatory FireSmart" means a change to the B.C. Building Code. Woodhurst's point was the opposite: while altering the code may seem out of reach, a strata, regional district or municipality could absolutely put a bylaw in place governing what people are landscaping with.
The legal machinery for that already exists. Wildfire Development Permit Areas, authorized under Division 7 of the Local Government Act and specifically section 491(2), let local governments set development guidelines for areas susceptible to wildfire. According to FireSmart BC's guidance for local governments, those guidelines can reach subdivision layout, fire-resistant building materials — roofing, siding, windows, decks, vents, eaves, fencing — and vegetation management including tree spacing, limbing and removal of coniferous trees within specified zones.
The critical qualifier is timing. Development permit areas are most effective at the point of development, or during retrofitting and renovation. They engage when something is being built, subdivided, rebuilt or substantially renovated. A house nobody is touching is largely outside their reach, which is why the same guidance notes other tools are needed for ongoing management of structures and vegetation on private property.
So the realistic shape of "mandatory" in the near term is narrower and more local than the phrase suggests:
Notice which end of the cost spectrum that hits. Landscaping rules apply to the cheap work. Material requirements apply mostly to people already spending money.
Building-standard bodies are moving in the same direction, as tiered resilience guidelines from ICLR and CHBA illustrate.
The instinct is to assume "mandatory FireSmart" means a change to the B.C. Building Code. Woodhurst's point was the opposite: while altering the code may seem out of reach, a strata, regional district or municipality could absolutely put a bylaw in place governing what people are landscaping with.
The legal machinery for that already exists. Wildfire Development Permit Areas, authorized under Division 7 of the Local Government Act and specifically section 491(2), let local governments set development guidelines for areas susceptible to wildfire. According to FireSmart BC's guidance for local governments, those guidelines can reach subdivision layout, fire-resistant building materials — roofing, siding, windows, decks, vents, eaves, fencing — and vegetation management including tree spacing, limbing and removal of coniferous trees within specified zones.
The critical qualifier is timing. Development permit areas are most effective at the point of development, or during retrofitting and renovation. They engage when something is being built, subdivided, rebuilt or substantially renovated. A house nobody is touching is largely outside their reach, which is why the same guidance notes other tools are needed for ongoing management of structures and vegetation on private property.
So the realistic shape of "mandatory" in the near term is narrower and more local than the phrase suggests:
Notice which end of the cost spectrum that hits. Landscaping rules apply to the cheap work. Material requirements apply mostly to people already spending money.
Building-standard bodies are moving in the same direction, as tiered resilience guidelines from ICLR and CHBA illustrate.
Insurance is the other lever that could make FireSmart effectively compulsory without any bylaw being passed, and it is worth understanding precisely — including its limits.
Today the program is voluntary. FireSmart BC's Wildfire Mitigation Program offers a professional on-site assessment and a follow-up report of property-specific actions, and completing it produces a mitigation certification the homeowner can share with participating insurance providers. Two insurers currently participate in B.C.: BCAA and Co-operators. One detail on the program's own hub is easy to miss and matters a great deal: FireSmart does not share the assessment or any of its details with the insurance industry. You hold your own evidence.
How that evidence is priced is inconsistent. Canadian Underwriter reported in July 2026 that Canada has no standardized framework requiring completed wildfire mitigation work to produce a specific premium discount. BCAA offers 15 per cent off for one policy term after an assessment, with further discounts possible on full certification. Everything beyond that is insurer-by-insurer and voluntary.
A completed assessment is not a guarantee of a lower premium, and no insurer is obligated to price it. What it does reliably give you is documentation — of what your property's risks are, what you did about them, and when. That record is what an insurer, a buyer or a municipality can actually evaluate.
The broader direction of travel is harder to ignore, and we have written about how climate risk is reshaping the availability of coverage across Canada.
Nothing described here obliges a B.C. homeowner to do anything today. The province's stated position remains that becoming wildfire resilient is a shared responsibility, delivered through education and voluntary programs. But the direction of the debate, the state of the funding and the tools already sitting in the Local Government Act all point the same way, and the cheapest moment to act on any of it is before a rule arrives.
Four questions get you a clear picture of your own exposure:
The perimeter work costs nothing but a weekend. The envelope work costs real money, and the pot that helps pay for it is smaller and harder to reach than it was two years ago. That asymmetry is the whole story.
Fire bans and seasonal restrictions are a separate but related pressure, which we cover in our reporting on wildfire bans and coverage checks.
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About the Author
Angela Nightingale is the Senior Editor at Homeowner.ca with two decades of experience in digital publishing and content strategy. She has owned two homes, taken on her share of DIY projects, and learned what most guides fail to mention. She writes from the belief that the best home guidance comes from people who have lived through the decisions — and her goal is always to leave readers feeling confident, not overwhelmed.
