Where Québec's fire seasons diverge, and where the danger repeats
Québec's protected forest runs on a two-zone system — an intensive protection zone (IPZ) in the south, largely fought fire-by-fire, and a vast northern zone mostly left to burn. Season-to-season swings between the two are extreme: 2023 burned more forest than the previous decade combined, while 2025 saw an above-average number of fires but one of the smallest burned areas on record.
Recent seasons, compared
Figures are for the Intensive Protection Zone (IPZ) — the ~130 municipalities SOPFEU actively fights fire in — unless noted.
Number of fires (IPZ)
Fire count alone doesn't predict a bad season — 2025 had more fires than 2023.
Area burned (IPZ)
This is where 2023 breaks the axis — nearly 84× 2024's total.
| Season | Fires (IPZ) | Area burned (IPZ) | Fires (northern zone) | Area burned (northern zone) | Dominant cause |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 566 | ~1,100,000 ha | 147 | ~3,200,000 ha | Lightning (99.9% of area) |
| 2024 | 352 | 13,884 ha | 166 | 177,306 ha | Mixed |
| 2025 | 528 | 1,314 ha | 31 | n/a | Human (87% of fires) |
What starts a Québec fire
Fire count skews human; burned area in extreme years skews lightning — the two metrics tell different stories.
Long-term average cause split
SOPFEU's own figure: of Québec's ~462 fires a year, roughly 370 are human-caused.
Of the human-caused share, by average fires per year:
Two seasons, opposite signatures
Why "cause" needs its own axis alongside "count" and "area" — the 80/20 split is a long-run average, not every season.
Is anything being done about it?
Yes — Québec runs an active, legally-backed prevention system, layered on top of firefighting.
Prevention measures in force
Under the Civil Protection Act and the Sustainable Forest Development Act.
- Seasonal burning permits — any open fire in or near forest requires a SOPFEU-issued permit every year from April 1 to November 15.
- Open-fire bans — campfires, fireworks, and spark-producing tools are prohibited outright once danger ratings rise; permits already issued can be cancelled mid-season.
- Forest access restrictions — public entry to specific forest sectors can be limited or barred entirely during extreme danger.
- Forestry-operation shutdowns — logging and other industrial forest work is paused, voluntarily or by order, in high-risk zones.
- Fines — violations of permits, bans, or access rules carry penalties from $500 to $50,000.
- Public awareness campaigns — SOPFEU runs recurring campaigns (including humor-driven ones) aimed specifically at the top human causes: campfires, debris burning, cigarettes.
Recent example
Prevention isn't just standing policy — it's invoked in-season.
What prevention can't reach: lightning. It's a minority of fires by count but has driven the overwhelming majority of area burned in Québec's worst seasons (see 2023, above) — which is why SOPFEU's other major investment is detection and rapid initial attack, not just prevention.
Smoke over Montréal & the South Shore
Montréal publishes an official yearly count of "poor air quality" and "smog" days; smog advisories are typically issued for Greater Montréal as one zone, so these figures are the best available proxy for the South Shore (Longueuil, Montérégie) too.
Smog days per year — Montréal
Days when air quality was officially flagged as smog, i.e. the days most likely to trigger "limit outdoor activity" guidance for kids and seniors.
*2025's official annual tally isn't published yet — striped bar isn't a value, see table.
How much of that was wildfire smoke
| Year | Poor air quality | Smog days | Of which, wildfire smoke |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 27 | 7 | 4 — smoke drifted in from Ontario/Manitoba fires |
| 2022 | 33 | 4 | Not broken out in the city's report |
| 2023 | 34 | 12 | ~12 — mostly Québec's own record season |
| 2024 | 22 | 5 | ~0 — typical winter/autumn causes instead |
| 2025 | TBD | TBD | At least 1 multi-day event confirmed (Jun 6–8, Prairie wildfire smoke; Environment Canada special air quality statement) |
Montréal doesn't publish a separate day-count specifically for the AQHI's "children and elderly" moderate-risk threshold — smog days (above) are the closest official metric, and are also when advisories explicitly name kids, seniors, and people with chronic illness.
A century and a half of fire
Selected events with reliable published figures — not a complete year-by-year record.
Where it keeps happening
No public point-level dataset was pulled for this dashboard (see note below) — these are the regions that recur across the events above and in SOPFEU's own regional reporting.
The northern zone itself — sparsely populated, mostly unsuppressed, and the source of nearly all of 2023's record area burned. Chibougamau saw the season's largest single evacuation.
Site of the 1870 Saguenay Fire and a recurring hotspot in SOPFEU's seasonal reviews, sitting at the southern edge of the boreal forest.
The La Tuque area was the epicenter of the 2010 fires, one of the largest IPZ events of the past two decades.
One of MFFP's mapped fire-regime zones and a consistent contributor to IPZ fire counts most seasons.