{"id":786451,"date":"2026-07-27T01:32:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T01:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/786451\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T01:32:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T01:32:13","slug":"canadian-negligence-is-making-americans-choke-on-fire-smoke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/786451\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian negligence is making Americans choke on fire smoke"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the third time in the past four years, Americans are\u00a0choking on smoke<\/a>\u00a0from Canada\u2019s burning forests. Last week, roughly 900 wildfires turned the skies over Minneapolis, Chicago and New York into an apocalyptic haze.<\/a> Air quality in parts of the Midwest ranked\u00a0among the worst on the planet<\/a>. More than 100 million people were under health alerts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Why does this keep happening?<\/a><\/p>\n

The smoke got President Trump\u2019s attention. In a Friday post<\/a> on Truth Social, Trump accused Canada of \u201cWillful Negligence\u201d and vowed to hold the country responsible<\/a> for \u201cnot properly maintaining\u201d its forests.<\/p>\n

At one point last week, more than 800 wildfires were burning across Canada. Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Post<\/p>\n

\u201cThe United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!\u201d he wrote, threatening to add the cost of the pollution to tariffs Canada already pays.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Three days later, the White House announced<\/a>\u00a050% tariffs on nearly $20 billion of Canadian imports. The administration cited<\/a> long-standing trade disputes, though the timing amplified tensions over the smoke.<\/p>\n

Canada isn\u2019t the only one with a wildfire problem. America\u2019s forests are burning too. Fires are raging<\/a> in northern Minnesota and across much of the western United States<\/a>. Nearly 4 million acres have already burned<\/a> nationwide this year, well above average for this point in the season. Over the weekend, smoke from fires in Washington and Oregon blanketed<\/a> parts of British Columbia.<\/p>\n

The response north of the border was predictable. Ontario Premier Doug Ford told<\/a> the president to quit complaining and send help. Prime Minister Mark Carney fell back on a familiar defense: \u201cClimate change is everyone\u2019s responsibility,\u201d he said<\/a>, \u201cincluding the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fires also threatened American homes this past week. The Upriver Fire in Spokane, Washington, burned more than 200 acres. Spokane Fire District 9 via AP<\/p>\n

The climate argument is well-worn. Canada\u2019s forests, the argument goes, are simply too vast and too remote to manage. Its dense stands of black spruce and jack pine evolved to burn in intense fires that destroy the main canopy and reset ecosystems. Once flames reach the treetops, a \u201ccrown fire\u201d can race across the canopy too hot and fast for firefighters to attack directly.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s some truth to that. Fire seasons have lasted longer in recent years. But neither Canada nor the United States is condemned to a future of smoke-choked skies. Policy choices shape how large and destructive fires become. Both governments have underinvested in prevention while restricting the tools that reduce fire risk. Now Canadians and Americans alike are paying the price.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s a steep price. Wildfire smoke carries fine particulate matter small enough to lodge deep in the lungs and enter the bloodstream. It aggravates asthma and raises the risk of heart attacks and strokes. A 2025 Nature study<\/a> estimated that smoke from Canada\u2019s record 2023 fires contributed to thousands of deaths in the United States.<\/p>\n

Chicago encouraged its denizens to stay inside as wildfire haze blanketed the city. Getty Images<\/p>\n

Those fires also released roughly 640 million metric tons of carbon<\/a>. That\u2019s more than the annual emissions of all but three countries<\/a>. If the fires were a country, they\u2019d have ranked as the world\u2019s fourth-largest carbon emitter. This year is on track for more of the same.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, Canada and the United States have tools to reduce the danger. The media and politicians are quick to blame climate change, but the reality is that forest management works<\/a>. Fuel treatments such as thinning, brush clearance and prescribed burning remove small trees, brush and dead material that allow flames to climb into the canopy and explode into a dangerous crown fire.<\/p>\n

The evidence in western US forests is hard to dismiss. A 2024 Forest Service meta-analysis<\/a> found that thinning followed by prescribed fire reduced the severity of later wildfires by 72% on average. Prescribed fire alone, or thinning followed by pile burning, reduced it by 62%.<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s boreal forest poses a harder problem. <\/p>\n

But even there, well-designed treatments can change a fire\u2019s behavior<\/a>. During Saskatchewan\u2019s 2014 Lagoon Fire, a high-intensity crown fire dropped to the ground after reaching an area that had been thinned and pruned. Crews stopped the fire after it advanced about 400 feet into the treatment. In an Alaska experiment, another crown fire became a surface fire within about 100 feet of entering a treated zone.<\/p>\n

Such treatments can save entire communities. The Westbank First Nation in British Columbia has long used thinning and controlled burning. The practices helped it escape major damage<\/a> when flames approached during a 2021 fire.<\/p>\n

Despite all this, Canada does strikingly little of this work. During Canada\u2019s 2023 fire season, The New York Times\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that the country\u2019s capacity to prevent wildfires had been \u201cshrinking for decades,\u201d turning some forests into \u201ca tinderbox.\u201d Canada conducts only \u201ca handful of controlled burns\u201d each year, the Times found.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t do anywhere near enough prescribed burning in [British Columbia],\u201d Robert Gray, a Canadian wildland fire ecologist, told CNN<\/a> that summer, noting that New Jersey does more controlled burns than the entire province. A new Canadian Senate report<\/a> states that only about 17,000 acres nationwide were treated with prescribed burning in 2023 \u2014 an area barely larger than Manhattan, in a country with 10% of the world\u2019s forests.<\/p>\n

Doug Ford has called President Trump a \u201crabid dog.\u201d AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

The problem is that Canada has regulated the cure nearly out of existence. \u201cEssentially, you\u2019ve handcuffed folks \u2014 foresters and silviculturists \u2014 from being able to get off successful prescribed burns because we made the rules so onerous and so restrictive,\u201d Sarah Bros, an Ontario forester who has done controlled burning, told<\/a> the Times.<\/p>\n

Why has Canada let this tool wither? Its wildfire agencies were built to put fires out, not use them to manage forests. The result is a series of practical barriers: too few trained crews, steep liability risks and air-quality rules that restrict controlled burns due to smoke concerns \u2014 even though such burns produce far less total smoke than the megafires they help prevent.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t mean Canada can manage its forests to prevent every large fire. But smarter targeting is needed: treating areas near towns, power lines and evacuation routes, plus adding strategic fuel breaks in remote areas.<\/p>\n

Doug Ford (left) and Mark Carney (right) signed a cooperation agreement between Ontario and Canada on Environmental and Impact Assessment in December 2025. AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

American forest management is snarled by many of the same problems. Prescribed burning is common in the southeast but is badly underused across western states, where permitting, environmental review and litigation frequently stall the work<\/a>. A recent study<\/a> found it takes an average of five to seven years to implement major fuel treatment projects due to excessive litigation and federal red tape.<\/p>\n

Both countries also struggle with firefighting coordination. The Canadian Senate report found that no single authority is responsible for national wildfire preparedness and response. Fire management is split among 10 provinces and three territories, with Ottawa providing money and emergency support. The report recommended creating a federal coordinating office for wildfires. Washington has begun moving in that direction by unifying the Interior Department\u2019s fire programs under the new US Wildland Fire Service<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Faster detection could help, too. Lightning strikes account for more than 80%<\/a> of the area burned in Canadian wildfires. Better lightning mapping and pre-positioned crews could catch more remote fires while they are still small. British Columbia is spending up to C$1 million to test a Vancouver startup\u2019s claim that it can reduce cloud-to-ground lightning<\/a> in high-risk storms. The technology is unproven<\/a>, but a closely monitored field trial is a reasonable way to find out.<\/p>\n

Oregon was hit by over 8,000 lightning strikes on July 22, sparking huge wildfires. Oregon Department of Forestry<\/p>\n

Washington has its own work to do. The bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act would speed fuel-reduction work<\/a> in high-risk areas. It passed the House last year but still awaits a floor vote in the Senate.<\/p>\n

Two related bills, the FIRE Act and the FENCES Act, would also help. The Clean Air Act can penalize states for the smoke from prescribed burns or from foreign sources, including Canadian blazes. The FIRE and FENCES acts would fix this. Both passed the House this spring but are stalled in the Senate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Canada and the United States cannot stop every wildfire, but they can keep more fires from growing into disasters that choke cities hundreds of miles away. The fires will return. Both countries should give them less to burn.<\/p>\n

Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the third time in the past four years, Americans are\u00a0choking on smoke\u00a0from Canada\u2019s burning forests. Last week,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":786452,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[36093,103,4253,192,1767,42337,79,6399],"class_list":["post-786451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-california-wildfires","tag-canada","tag-climate-change","tag-environment","tag-opinion","tag-postscript","tag-science","tag-wildfires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786451\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/786452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}