Want to travel in Manitoba? Some restrictions may apply

The Bur Oak Trail is a one-kilometre, stroller-friendly walking loop sandwiched between the main road running through Birds Hill Provincial Park and residential homes on Mulder Drive in the Rural Municipality of Springfield.

The trail is 20 metres from the nearest pavement. You'd have to walk it seven times to rack up 10,000 steps. No one would mistake this Winnipeg-area trail for wilderness — but it's off-limits right now due to sweeping provincial restrictions on backcountry travel during this unusual spring wildfire season.

The curious case of the Bur Oak closure is not an isolated instance. Consider Turtle Mountain Provincial Park, which is 343 kilometres away from the nearest active wildfire in Manitoba, an 89-square-kilometre blaze under control in Sandilands Provincial Forest.

It takes three and a half hours in a car to move between these two natural areas. Yet travel on most of the lakes and all the trails in Turtle Mountain is forbidden due to the same backcountry restrictions imposed upon all provincial parks on provincial parcels of Crown land.

Then there's Riding Mountain National Park, which is very much in Manitoba, but falls under federal jurisdiction. All 370 kilometres of trails in Riding Mountain are open, along with with 36 backcountry campsites you can reserve right now with a couple of clicks on the Parks Canada reservation page.

Similarly, the vast majority of parks, trails, wilderness areas and backcountry campsites in other Canadian provinces and most U.S. states are open regardless of the 2025 wildfire threat, save for those actually experiencing a wildfire, located close to a fire or considered unsafe due to the wobbly, charred tree trunks left behind from a recent blaze.

For decades, Manitoba's practice of enacting blanket restrictions on backcountry travel by ordinary people on foot, on bicycles or in canoes or kayaks has stood out as unusual in North America.

Civil servants and politicians alike have not been able to elucidate the rationale for the policy, beyond the insistence that these restrictions — which typically do not apply to licensed outfitters and resource-extraction industries — are necessary to prevent more fires from materializing.

No provincial administration, regardless of whether the New Democrats or Progressive Conservatives are in power, has been able explain why Parks Canada, other provinces and U.S. states tend to draw circles around actual fires and tell people not to wander into them, while Manitoba attempts to enshroud every prairie crocus, poplar and pine cone in the province within the public-policy equivalent of bubble wrap.

Efforts to get officials to explain the restrictions vary, depending on who's doing the talking.

"We put them in place because of the potential for human-caused fires," said Kristin Hayward, the assistant deputy minister in charge of Manitoba's wildfire service and conservation officer service, speaking during a wildfire briefing on Monday. "We want to minimize people out on the landscape in places where fires could start."

Hayward said the policy is not due to a lack of staff or other resources within Manitoba. But there are noticeable differences between the way this province manages backcountry use compared to other jurisdictions.

Right next door in Ontario, backcountry travel in most provincial parks requires people to register, pay nightly fees and, usually, file a travel plan. This practice is in place in a variety of parks, including road-accessible Rushing River, relatively unvisited Woodland Caribou and the heavily-paddled canoe destination of Quetico.

Registration allows Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources to manage visitor numbers, locate paddlers and hikers in the event of an emergency and collect some revenue to support the activities of staff within these parks.

Manitoba typically does not manage backcountry travel. Hayward can be correct in stating this is not due to a lack of resources when this sort of management simply has not been a priority in this province.

According to Premier Wab Kinew, however, a lack of provincial firefighting resources is what he calls "the actual reason" for the backcountry travel ban.

"We can not afford to pull resources into dealing with the local fire situation in different parts of the province, given the severity that we see in the north," Kinew said in a scrum on June 6.

The implication here is permit-holding outfitters, logging companies and miners can be trusted not to spark forest fires, while ordinary people carrying backpacks and paddles can not.

Mike Moyes, Manitoba minister of the environment and climate change, made this explicitly clear last week.

"We want to ensure that the resources are being put to the areas of greatest use in fighting these wildfires," Moyes said in an interview on June 10. "If we're having folks that inadvertently cause a wildfire, that can be really catastrophic in terms of of human safety, but also in terms of pulling resources from other areas."

There are times when other jurisdictions have adopted a Manitoba-style blanket backcountry travel ban. Ontario, for example, enacted one for several weeks in 2023, when forests to the north and west of Lake Superior were on fire.

This 2025 fire season in Manitoba has been significant. So far, 9,012 square kilometres have burned, which works out to 1.6 per cent of the province's total land mass.

In other words, it is unsurprising to see the province impose blanket backcountry restrictions in this year of all years. Such restrictions were imposed during less severe fire seasons in the recent past, including those in 2006, 2011 and 2021.

The question for officials is whether Manitoba's policies governing backcountry travel can be changed in a manner that would preclude the need for these restrictions during future wildfire emergencies. Climate changes has made more severe fire seasons inevitable. It is unclear whether Manitoba can adapt.