{"id":809552,"date":"2026-07-18T06:50:43","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T06:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/809552\/"},"modified":"2026-07-18T06:50:43","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T06:50:43","slug":"wildfire-expert-offers-reality-check-for-u-s-lawmakers-who-castigated-canada-for-smoke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/809552\/","title":{"rendered":"Wildfire expert offers reality check for U.S. lawmakers who castigated Canada for smoke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Smoke from wildfires in Canada and Minnesota engulfs the Washington, D.C., skyline, reducing visibility and casting a haze over the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial on Friday.Finn Gomez\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

U.S. President Donald Trump is blaming Canadian forest management for the smoke that has blanketed parts of the United States, threatening to increase tariffs<\/a> to compensate for U.S. expenses caused by plummeting air quality. <\/p>\n

But a wildfire expert says the President\u2019s claims lack grounding in science and excoriated the remedies aimed at Canada as being unreasonable. <\/p>\n

In a Truth Social post Friday, Mr. Trump wrote that he would \u201chold Canada responsible\u201d for not \u201cproperly managing their Forests.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCanada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal,\u201d the President wrote, claiming cross-border smoke was costing the U.S. \u201cBillions of Dollars,\u201d which would be added to tariffs he claimed Canada is currently paying.<\/p>\n

The U.S. President said he would call Prime Minister Mark Carney on Friday to discuss the issue, and made no concrete proposal for what tariffs, if any, he could apply. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a ruling earlier this year, constrained Mr. Trump from summarily imposing tariffs on an emergency basis. Mr. Carney\u2019s office did not return a request for comment. <\/p>\n

Smoke covers Southern Ontario and parts of U.S., but rain may offer relief<\/a><\/p>\n

The move comes two days after Republican congress members from Michigan claimed in a letter to Mr. Carney that the fires are \u201ca crisis that Canada has the tools to prevent and has chosen not to.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAmerican lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction on wildfires, year after year,\u201d they wrote. <\/p>\n

The four authors of the letter did not respond to requests for comment. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In a statement posted to social media, Eleanor Olszewski, the federal minister of emergency management and community resilience, said Canada and the United States are continuing to work together to fight wildfires on both sides of the border based on an agreements signed in 1982 and at the G7 meeting in Alberta in 2025. <\/p>\n

\u201cAs part of this work, both countries remain in constant contact about the evolving wildfire situation,\u201d she wrote. <\/p>\n

Her post did not say whether Mr. Trump and Mr. Carney had spoken. Nor did it address criticism that Canadian forest policies did not include aggressive efforts to clear fuel from its vast forests. <\/p>\n

Bob Gray, a Chilliwack, B.C.-based certified wildfire ecologist, said the U.S. complaints sidestep the fact that wildfire smoke routinely crosses the border in both directions. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe trade smoke back and forth across the border all the time,\u201d said Gray, who started his career decades ago as an elite wildland firefighter in the U.S.<\/p>\n

He pointed to 2020, when smoke from fires in the western U.S. choked Vancouver\u2019s harbour. In 2023, a fast-moving wildfire roared across the border from Washington state into Osoyoos, B.C. and nearly wiped out several subdivisions. And blazes in Minnesota crossed the border into Ontario earlier this year. <\/p>\n

Mr. Gray said given the extreme conditions under which the Ontario fires exploded, there was never a real prospect of putting them out.<\/p>\n

The majority of the fires were ignited around July 12 by a lightning storm across the region. The Fire Weather Index, a numerical rating of potential fire intensity, was off the charts. Forest fuels were so dry that virtually everything would have been available to burn. Another indicator measuring the expected severity reached the top of existing scales, making it far too dangerous to put firefighters on the ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t fight those fires,\u201d Mr. Gray said. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

ANGELA WEISS\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Smoke clouds the sky near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, above, and on the Toronto Islands earlier this week.COLE BURSTON\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

High wind speeds pushing the fires across largely flat boreal forest meant that even air assets like water bombers and helicopters would likely not have worked, Mr. Gray said.<\/p>\n

Canadian fire crews battle wildfires using roughly the same tactics and strategies of their U.S. counterparts, Mr. Gray said. <\/p>\n

In recent years, Canada has moved away from aggressively suppressing all wildfires, instead choosing what\u2019s called a \u201cmodified response\u201d in some cases where conditions indicate fires can be safely left to burn, which is also similar to the U.S.<\/p>\n

American accusations that Canada has not done enough to reduce forest fuel loading across the country, which is leading to larger and more destructive wildfires, has some truth to it, Mr. Gray said. But the solution is much more nuanced than Mr. Trump\u2019s argument suggests.<\/p>\n

Modern megafires are a result of primarily two things. Climate change is making forests drier and droughts deeper and more frequent, and creating the conditions for more frequent lightning storms. <\/p>\n

Opinion: How we created a devastating fire debt<\/a><\/p>\n

The other significant factor is the \u201cfire debt\u201d that North Americans created across fire prone landscapes through 100 years of obsessively trying to extinguish all wildfires, letting forests grow unnaturally dense. Now when they burn, they burn hotter and more intensely.<\/p>\n

Canadian provinces lag behind some U.S. states when it comes to the use of prescribed fire to reduce fuel loads. The state of New Jersey, which is 43 times smaller than B.C., uses prescribed burning on almost five times as much land per year as B.C. does.<\/p>\n

We \u201ccould be doing more prescribed burning and cultural burning,\u201d Mr. Gray said. <\/p>\n

However, more forest thinning wouldn\u2019t have stopped the current Ontario wildfires. Those forests are too remote to be reasonable targets for fuel thinning with no roads to access them, Mr. Gray said. <\/p>\n

Why wildfire smoke is difficult to forecast and damaging to our health<\/a><\/p>\n

Ironically, one of the biggest impediments to fuel treatments is the economics around them. <\/p>\n

The work costs between $1,500 to $10,000 per hectare. A 2023 report<\/a> found that B.C. alone likely needs more than 390,000 hectares of forests thinned. <\/p>\n

In order to make fuels thinning economically viable, there needs to be a market for all the wood fibre that must be removed from Canadian forests. But Americans\u2019 tariff policies undermine any viable market for that fibre, Mr. Gray said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have a Canadian fire problem or an American fire problem, but we have a North America fire problem,\u201d Mr. Gray said. \u201cSo we have to look at it in an integrated way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Smoke from wildfires in Canada and Minnesota engulfs the Washington, D.C., skyline, reducing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":809553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[901,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,44,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-809552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-alberta","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-news","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/809553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}