{"id":818045,"date":"2026-07-22T06:36:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T06:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/818045\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T06:36:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T06:36:11","slug":"trump-is-punishing-canada-for-wildfire-smoke-for-bizarre-reasons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/818045\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump is punishing Canada for wildfire smoke for bizarre reasons."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump is displeased and waging economic war with Canada yet again, this time because\u00a0\u2026\u00a0our northern neighbor isn\u2019t doing enough to fight the effects of climate change?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!\u201d the chief executive wrote<\/a> in a Friday Truth Social post, referring to the intense clouds of wildfire smog of Ontario origin that are choking states and currently wafting as far as Seattle<\/a> and Pittsburgh<\/a>. \u201cCanada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal\u00a0\u2026\u00a0costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.\u201d (On Monday, Trump rolled out new 50\u00a0percent tariffs on a wide array of Canadian goods, including alcohol and hockey sticks, but an official told CNBC that these are separate from his plans<\/a> to hike trade taxes in response to the wildfires.)<\/p>\n

The president also revealed to the media that he had confronted Prime Minister Mark Carney during Sunday\u2019s FIFA World Cup finals in New Jersey. \u201cI\u00a0told him, you know, you got to stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air,\u201d said Trump. \u201cIf we can help them, we\u2019ll help them. But maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some\u00a0tariffs.\u201d After some more rambling, the Donald hit on something of an inconvenient truth. \u201cI never remembered this happening,\u201d he added<\/a>. \u201cOver the last four or five years you saw it starting to take place. I never remembered it happening before.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s almost like\u00a0the climate is changing!<\/p>\n

If you didn\u2019t know better, you might have thought Trump was taking Carney to task for failing to stem the greenhouse gas emissions that have made North America hotter and sparked the conditions for Ontario\u2019s raging forest fires. Such criticism would have been warranted, in light of the stark gap between the PM\u2019s climate-conscious rhetoric<\/a> and his pro-fossil-fuel policy<\/a>. What we\u2019re actually seeing, however, is something far more craven: an attempt to seize upon one of the president\u2019s most specific, oddest environmental fixations in order to rattle the imperial saber at the north\u2019s Liberal government. By vaguely\u2014and inaccurately<\/a>\u2014gesturing toward forest management, Trump is imposing material punishment upon a fellow petrostate for failing to mitigate the effects of its still-too-high emissions. It\u2019s a way to attack Canada over climate change without ever using those words\u2014and without even suggesting the real policies that would help North America avoid these forest-and-smoke cycles year after year.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the first time the MAGA-era GOP has scolded Canada thus. Last summer, Midwestern Republicans sent various letters to Ottawa over its \u201cfailure to prevent and control wildfires<\/a>\u201d\u2014without, of course, mentioning climate change. This year the clamor is louder, more aggressive, and tinged with showy economic threats. Michigan Rep. John James, running for governor in a state that saw some of the worst air pollution from the smog, announced he would introduce legislation imposing sanctions on Canada<\/a>. Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno also offered to follow suit<\/a> in his chamber, while Montana Rep. Tim Sheehy accused Canada of running its firefighting operations \u201clike a Chinese protection racket,\u201d in a message approvingly amplified<\/a> by Trump.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Fred Kaplan
\n We Just Learned What the War in Iran Is Really About for Trump
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The second Trump administration is thus threatening Canada threefold over its hazy call for improved forest management: Failure to contain the smoke could mean even more tariffs on top of the current trade war escalation, full blockades of certain goods and services, and even a pullback of American assistance for Canada\u2019s firefights. And since the White House\u2019s climate denial remains strong, it\u2019s unclear just what it\u2019s expecting Canada to do here\u2014other than retaliate in ways that hit the U.S. even harder. Conservative Ontario Premier Doug Ford has already suggested that Ottawa should strike back proportionately: \u201ctariff for tariff, dollar for dollar<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before this point, the administration\u2019s policy toward Canada had been nothing less than a self-own. The constant trade-warring and \u201c51st state\u201d menacing bred such anti-American sentiment across Canada that our longtime friends in the north turned against us decisively\u2014and effectively. Boycotts of U.S. whiskey have decimated a key economic driver<\/a> for the American South. Major cities throughout the States have seen crushing drops in Canadian tourism<\/a> and business it affords to costly enterprises like ski resorts<\/a>. And the Canadian government as a whole is planning a pivot away from the U.S. in the long term, welcoming cheap Chinese electric cars<\/a> and building out oil-and-gas pipelines<\/a> to increase energy exports to Asia.<\/p>\n

Those pipelines will worsen the conditions that set off Canada\u2019s devastating wildfires\u2014but that\u2019s not what Trump is worrying about at all. When the U.S. president talks about \u201cDebris Removal\u201d and the \u201cBrush\u201d in forestry, he\u2019s generally referring to prescribed or controlled burning, an Indigenous-pioneered environmental practice<\/a> that slows the rapid spread of forest fires in dry climates by clearing out ground-level scraps (twigs, dead plant matter, bushes, etc.) that would otherwise provide extra kindling for the flames. You may remember the president invoking it repeatedly in California, after 2018\u2019s deadly Camp Fire<\/a> and during last year\u2019s Palisades burns<\/a>. He\u2019s not wrong about the merits<\/a> of controlled burns, but he\u2019s wrong that they\u2019re a straightforward panacea for wildfire season: Climate effects like drought, temperature hikes, and the spread of plant diseases strengthen fire conditions, and those climate consequences are bolstered by unceasing carbon and methane emissions that trap heat. Worse, burned trees release the carbon they were storing, then destroy other plant life that could keep that carbon absorbed.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Trump Won\u2019t Say Two Words When Blaming Canada for the Wildfire Smoke
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Trump is also wrong about prescribed burns as the be-all and end-all for Canadian forest preservation. Those green ecosystems are far different from California\u2019s; our neighbor\u2019s fires generally arise in massive boreal forests<\/a>, which do not have debris or brush concerns because they\u2019ve never been logged or otherwise interfered with. Boreal forests are also supposed to burn on an infrequent basis, in order to open up certain pine cones<\/a> and spread their seeds, or to clear out lower tree branches. But climate change has thrown the entire cycle out of whack, and these forests are now bursting into flame more frequently\u2014on the yearly basis that Trump and other Americans have come to experience this decade. And under a climate change\u2013driven heat dome that fuels more storms, the forests are all the more susceptible to inopportune lightning strikes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, because Trump and his fellow Republicans view climate change as a hoax, they have zero solutions for the widespread, fatal conflagrations of the type that Canada and the U.S. witness every season. Remember this when you see the commander in chief posting about \u201cclimate fraud<\/a>\u201d (i.e., acknowledging that climate change is real) and international green policies<\/a>. Or whenever you see Republicans doing everything they can to make life in a warming world worse than it already is, by stripping away heat protections<\/a> from outdoor workers and shrinking public lands<\/a>. They don\u2019t care about Canada taking steps to mitigate global warming. What they do care about is using anything they can to attack one of our oldest allies\u2014even as this ill-advised battle weakens the United States economically and only encourages Canada to industrialize in a manner that will make future wildfire smoke far, far worse.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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