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Our current wildfire season, on track to be the second-worst on record, has been making headlines all summer, as toxic smoke has breached borders and enveloped several North American cities in a polluted haze.

According to a spokesperson for Environment Canada, Ontario alone has issued 654 air-quality alerts related to wildfire smoke since May — more than any other province.

During periods of poor air quality, public-health experts recommend taking smoke and its harms seriously: respect the vulnerability of children and seniors, avoid strenuous outdoor activities, close your windows, run an air filter (if possible), wear a well-fitted N95 mask outside.

It’s good advice. Few seem to have taken it.

To be fair, the public has been juggling competing crises since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, including massive geopolitical shifts and well-resourced movements working aggressively to wind back the clock on society’s achievements in public health, human rights and climate science.

It’s within this broader context that I felt inordinately irritated by the aforementioned advice: Stay inside. Keep the kids at home. Most of us can’t even stay home from work to care for our children when they’re ill. What are the chances we’ll be allowed to take a “toxic air pollution” day?

Wildfire smoke is the crisis of the season, but how are we to protect ourselves from predatory politicians pouncing on such readily exploitable crises to make our lives more difficult and more precarious?

In the United States, the Trump administration is busy dismantling expert-led social infrastructure that touches on every aspect of human health and the environment, undermining hard-won environmental regulations and “updating” national climate assessments. Our response to U.S. disintegration thus far has been to pass sweeping bills to expedite energy, mining and infrastructure projects; Ontario, British Columbia and the federal government have all approved bills to this effect, and they’ve done so in swift succession.

The novelty of co-operation between the feds and the provinces (psst: Ontario’s health-care system would like a word) is complicated by concerns about the rapidity with which these bills were pushed through, not to mention how they will play out or what impact they might have on human health and the environment.

Governments that have treated Indigenous communities as an afterthought — Ontario, for example, had to amend a bill in June to acknowledge the province’s duty to consult — paint a worrying picture of Canada’s future progress toward reconciliation. And those of us still reeling from the pile-on of ignorance during the pandemic may well detect a kind of “Climate Convoy” building, too. I once saw the term “climate lockdown” used to describe Nova Scotia’s ban on walking, hiking, camping and fishing in wooded areas as a protection against wildfires, and I felt a combination of dread and déjà vu — dréjà vu, if you will.

If there’s a bright side to history repeating itself, however, it’s that it can teach us to recognize the circus before it sets up shop and makes a spectacle out of swallowing fire. In the U.S., Republican lawmakers now dismantling climate and health science made a mockery of genuine public-health concerns when they claimed Canada hadn’t done enough to prevent wildfire smoke from crossing the border. Our failure to match their malicious clowning with expert-informed policy rooted in prevention constitutes a serious vulnerability.

When supportive labour protections and substantive investments in clean indoor air turn health and climate knowledge into part of our structural reality, the antagonistic forces of “Get back to the office” and “Protect yourself from illness” may even feel complementary.

Failing to respect expert advice is like ignoring the reason we still gather to build bonfires, even in spite of our increasingly screened-in lives: because although we understand that fire is a destructive force, we know that it has the power to bring us together, too.