EDMONTON, Alberta (LifeSiteNews) – Alberta Premier Danielle Smith pledged to hire outside arson investigators to determine why some 175 wildfires that have raged across the vast expanse of the province in recent weeks have “no known cause at the moment.”

Smith made the comments last Thursday while speaking on a podcast with known left-leaning host Ryan Jespersen of Real Talk.

“I think you’re watching as I am the number of stories about arson,” Smith said during the podcast.

“I’m very concerned that there are arsonists, and there have been stories as well that we’re investigating, and we’re bringing in arson investigators from outside the province.”

She then said, “We have almost 175 fires with no known cause at the moment.”

Jespersen had claimed to Smith that the wildfires in Alberta, as well as the rest of Canada, were a “real-life metaphor — happening in front of us with a historic wildfire season.”

“Every expert that we talk to indicates the significant factor that climate change is playing on our susceptibility to wildfire and on the conditions that lead to these massive blazes that are happening earlier and earlier in the season,” he said.

Smith responded to him by saying, “Sometimes they (wildfires) are very easy to trace — when you have lightning storms, it’s easy to trace. When you have a train derailment, that’s easy to trace.”

When Jespersen pressed Smith by trying to say the fires were related to so-called “climate change,” she did not answer him.

Smith made the comments less than two weeks after she led the United Conservative Party (UCP) to victory in a general Alberta election, defeating the leftist NDP under its leader Rachel Notley.

During the campaign of Alberta’s 2023 election, Smith had to pause to deal with many wildfires that suddenly, out of nowhere, ravaged the province. The fires came on suddenly and uncharacteristically considering the heavy snowfall in the province in early March and rain in April.

As it stands now, there are about 72 or so active wildfires in Alberta, but, overall, the fires have been going down.

Smith noted that Alberta needs to do a better job of making sure that there are fire guards built around communities and said that forest fires are a fact of life in Alberta, as they have been for hundreds of years.

“We’re going to have forest fires; it’s the nature of what we have in Alberta,” she noted.

“And it’s our job as government to make sure that we mitigate, that we manage, and that we have the resources available when they do erupt.”

Many of the fires have already been attributed to arson.

For instance, on May 3, Parkland County tweeted out a plea for assistance from the public concerning no less than four suspicious fires near the provincial capital of Edmonton.

“We are asking residents to report any suspicious behaviour to RCMP by calling 9-1-1,” the county wrote on Twitter.

Also, there is the case of John Cook, who was arrested and charged with 10 counts of arson after he set multiple wildfires in the Cold Lake area, which is close to Edmonton.

Additionally, Cook was also charged with setting on fire a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Cherry Grove, Alberta.

In the past few months, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have also made several arrests of arsonists charged with lighting fires across many provinces, such as Nova Scotia, Yukon, British Columbia, and Alberta. It is not clear what the motive behind the arson fires are.

Last week, LifeSiteNews reported that despite the arrest of multiple arsonists, Canada’s mainstream media in Canada and the federal government have been pushing a narrative attributing the recent wildfires to “climate change.”

However, statistics from Canada’s National Fire Database show that wildfires have gone down in recent years and, in fact, peaked in 1989.

Last week, LifeSiteNews also reported about how as the legacy media keeps up its call that “climate change” is to blame for new fires in Quebec, satellite footage actually shows the peculiar near-simultaneous eruption of multiple blazes across the province, which is experiencing its worst-ever fire season in recent years.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has used “climate change” and forest fires as a catalyst for propping up his government’s much-maligned carbon tax, which Smith opposes. He has blamed the fires on “climate change.”

Trudeau has been calling for increased bans on Canada’s natural resources, of which Alberta has in abundance.

Smith has vowed to fight Trudeau on his attacks against Alberta’s oil and gas industry.

The reduction and eventual elimination of so-called “fossil fuels” and a transition to unreliable “green” energy has also been pushed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) – the globalist group behind the socialist “Great Reset” agenda in which Trudeau and some of his cabinet are involved.

A June 2017 peer-reviewed study by two scientists and a veteran statistician confirmed that most of the recent global warming data have been “fabricated by climate scientists to make it look more frightening.”