This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.<\/p>\n
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I\u2019m Amy Goodman.<\/p>\n
Millions across North America face another day of hazardous air pollution as nearly a thousand active wildfires continue to rage in Canada. Hazardous air quality alerts are once again in effect today for major cities including Chicago, Detroit, Columbus and Minneapolis. Here in New York, air quality has improved \u2014 at least for now \u2014 following what officials are calling the second-worst smoke event in New York City modern history. In Canada, the fires have disproportionately impacted Indigenous communities, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes.<\/p>\n
On Friday, President Trump threatened to impose new tariffs on Canada over the record levels of hazardous air. Trump wrote, quote, \u201cThe United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable,\u201d Trump said. But Trump has not said a word about climate change, which many scientists say is a driving force behind the fires.<\/p>\n
We go now to Montreal, where we\u2019re joined by Rachel Gilmore, independent journalist, creator of Bubble Pop Media.<\/p>\n
Thanks so much for being with us, Rachel. If you can talk about what\u2019s happening in Canada, the blowback, I guess you could say, in the United States, and President Trump threatening Carney and Canada with tariffs, blaming Carney for what\u2019s happening in Canada, actually standing next to Carney and the Mexican president at the World Cup on Sunday in New Jersey?<\/p>\n
RACHEL GILMORE: Yeah, the situation in Canada is \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s horrifying. I mean, we\u2019re watching the impact of the climate crisis in real time. It\u2019s disproportionately impacting, as you noted, Indigenous communities here. People have had to flee their homes, a large number of them ending up in Thunder Bay, where there\u2019s actually not enough space for everyone. The people are camping in tents just so that they have somewhere safe to sleep, that isn\u2019t their communities that they\u2019ve had to leave behind because of the ravaging wildfires. As you noted, there\u2019s almost a thousand of them burning. It\u2019s genuinely a crisis. There\u2019s lots of mobilization happening here in Canada.<\/p>\n
And the commentary from Trump was extremely offensive to a lot of Canadians. I mean, what else is new? I think, unfortunately, no one\u2019s really surprised by it anymore up here. But, you know, particularly given just days before he made those comments, a Canadian firefighter had died in Colorado fighting wildfires, so it was just extremely, extremely tone-deaf.<\/p>\n
But the additional horror, I guess, of just the apathy in Trump\u2019s comments is the reality that he\u2019s not acknowledging climate change. And Mark Carney sort of did a little bit of \u2014 he doesn\u2019t usually respond directly to the more unhinged stuff that Trump says, but he sort of made this comment about how it is the climate crisis that is making the dry and hot conditions for more wildfires to be sparked when there\u2019s more extreme weather, which causes more lightning strikes. But the difficulty here is that, you know, as much as Carney\u2019s saying that in response to Trump, he\u2019s not exactly taking the climate action that we need here in Canada \u2014\u00a0in fact, quite the opposite \u2014\u00a0despite him sort of selling himself as this climate guy leaning on his credentials from his time at the United Nations.<\/p>\n
AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about that? I mean, on the one hand, you have President \u2014 you have Prime Minister Carney announcing a multibillion-dollar strategy on what he called breaking Canada\u2019s economic dependence on the U.S., which must have infuriated President Trump. But it includes a new pipeline in Alberta and building up multiple liquefied natural gas terminals. The proposed pipeline would move 1 million barrels of oil daily from landlocked Alberta to the southern coast of British Columbia, near Vancouver. If you can talk more about the significance of this, Rachel?<\/p>\n
RACHEL GILMORE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of us were shocked by the announcement, because so many people had this idea that Carney would at least give the tiniest bit of a damn about the climate crisis. And yeah, he came out and made this announcement alongside Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Alberta is where most of the oil is in Canada. It\u2019s where we have our oil sands. And, you know, they announced this new proposed pipeline.<\/p>\n
And what\u2019s ridiculous about it is the claim is that we need this investment in oil and gas to diversify away from the United States, but the economic case even isn\u2019t there. We just twinned a TMX pipeline to the West Coast, and just now it\u2019s starting to make about a billion dollars annually. And we paid, the Canadian taxpayers, $34 billion for that pipeline, which means it will have to make that kind of profit for 34 more years to be profitable. And that\u2019s the previous pipeline that the Canadian people were forced to buy by a Liberal government. And now Mark Carney is saying that he\u2019s, you know, offering his full-throated support for another oil pipeline? I mean, the only way that we can actually profit from that oil pipeline is if we absolutely abandon the fight against climate change, because we would need there to be a world where demand for oil and gas continues to uptick for decades into the future to actually make money off of this pipeline. So, it makes no economic sense.<\/p>\n
And obviously, it is a horrific plan for the climate crisis. In Canada, our oil and gas sector is our largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. And Mark Carney is selling this snake oil solution of carbon capture and storage to go alongside the oil and gas pipeline. But he\u2019s offering a tax credit for oil companies that use that captured carbon to actually inject it into depleted oil wells, fracking out more oil that otherwise would not be able to be accessed by those companies. So they get a tax credit for that.<\/p>\n