Log fire burning bright on a cold winter night

Legend has it that Santa enters the home through a fireplace chimney, a challenge in today’s modern world of electric baseboards, natural gas furnaces and solar home heating systems. Yet, wood remains a warm presence in Canadian life, whether it’s glowing in a fireplace on a cold winter night or roasting s’mores at a cottage campfire.

Approximately 2% of Canadian households reported using wood or wood pellets as their primary heat source in 2023, down from 4% a decade earlier.

Households outside of large urban centres (6%) were much more likely to use wood or wood pellets as their primary heat source than those in census metropolitan areas (1%) in 2023. Nevertheless, this was down by half compared with a decade earlier, when 12% of households outside of large urban areas mainly used wood to heat their home.

Approximately one in six Canadian households (16%) reported burning wood or wood pellets in their primary or secondary home in 2023, whether it be in a heating stove, an indoor fireplace, an outdoor fire pit or a campfire at a cottage.

Approximately 1 in 25 Canadian households reported owning a secondary property, such as a cottage, in 2023. Among those, just under half (48%) reported burning wood or wood pellets at their secondary property.

Generally, two forms of wood are used to build a fire in Canada: wood and wood pellets. Firewood is generally sold in cords, that is, a pile of split logs stacked four feet high, four feet wide and eight feet long. Wood pellets are made by compressing leftover sawdust and wood shavings with a bonding agent.

Judging by the data, Canadian households prefer the allure of a natural log fire over mill floor sweepings by a wide margin.

In 2023, Canadian households burned almost 2.2 million cords of wood at their primary residence, whether it be in a heating stove, fireplace or outdoor fire pit, generating 35.7 billion megajoules of energy in the process.

Households also burned 51.7 million kilograms of wood pellets at their primary home, generating 983.2 million megajoules of energy.

Perhaps surprisingly, considerably less wood overall is burned at secondary residences, such as cottages, than at primary homes.

In 2023, Canadian households burned 177,571 cords of wood at their secondary residence, generating 2.5 billion megajoules of energy in the process; both figures are well below one-tenth of what was burned at primary residences.

Primary and secondary residences combined, Canadian households burned 2.3 million cords of wood overall in 2023. That’s enough wood to build a 5,600-kilometre, four-foot-high, four-foot-wide log wall, which is comparable with the distance of the Trans-Canada Highway from Vancouver to Fredericton.