US Republicans are threatening to sanction Canada and Canadian government officials after smoke from devastating wildfires has drifted across huge swathes of the US, creating hazy conditions and dangerous air quality for tens of millions of Americans. Fires are also blazing across the US, and the Trump administration has recently repealed several climate protections.
Donald Trump on Friday blamed his country’s northern neighbor for the smoke spreading from wildfires and said he planned to call Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, to ask about Ottawa’s plans for dealing with the blazes. In a post on Truth Social, the US president said the US had been “invaded” by dirty air. “The cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying,” he wrote.
It comes a day after Bernie Moreno, a GOP senator of Ohio, said he would introduce a bill next week “to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity”. In a statement, he said Canada’s government had “failed to invest in wildfire prevention methods including forest thinning, fuel reduction, prescribed burns, and stronger enforcement against arson”. Ohio shares a maritime border with the Canadian province of Ontario. Four Republican members of the House who represent Michigan, another state along the northern border, also wrote to Carney to say: “If Canada will not manage its forests to prevent these fires, the United States will look elsewhere, and act on our own, to protect our people.”
Asked about the American accusations, Carney told reporters on Thursday: “Fighting climate change is the responsibility of all countries, including the United States.”
Fires are also blazing across the US, in what the National Interagency Fire Center deems an above-average year. So far this year, more than 5,740 sq miles of the US has burned from wildfires, which is 31% more than the average of the previous 10 years to this date. The amount of US land burned each year in the 2020s is now more than twice what it was 30 years ago. In northern Minnesota, more than 63,000 acres have burned, while wildfires in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho have also been reported, contributing to the smoke that Canadians must also contend with, as smoke from US wildfires drifts north and affects air quality.
Canada’s largest fire, near Ontario’s remote Wabakimi provincial park, is reportedly spread across 787,802 acres (318,812 hectares). It is among 191 out-of-control and large fires that were burning as of Friday morning. Thousands of people in the province have been evacuated and at least one First Nations community has been erased in the fires. On Wednesday, Toronto, also in the midst of a record-breaking heatwave, had the worst air quality in the world. Nearly 6m acres are estimated to have burned, less than a quarter of land consumed by blazes when Canadian wildfire smoke last blanketed the US in 2023.
The planet’s heating climate is causing warmer, drier conditions in the summer, which is amplifying wildfire activity. The US is the world’s largest oil-and-gas-producing nation and has historically emitted more greenhouse gases than any other country. In the last year and a half, Trump has taken a sledgehammer to US climate policy, bolstering the domestic fossil fuel industry while rolling back environmental protections. The administration has also suppressed climate research and dismantled key agencies through mass firings. In another instance, the administration has moved to shutter several government labs that studied how wildfires affect human health, air quality, wildlife habitat and forest ecosystems, which some scientists warned in May could hinder efforts to protect people and the environment from wildfires as soon as this summer.
On Friday, about 109 million people remained affected by poor air quality across the US midwest, mid-Atlantic and north-east. The pungent wildfire smoke blanketed cities such as Chicago and Detroit, where residents on Friday were warned to stay indoors and reduce activity levels after the air quality index reached a “hazardous” 361. The smoke also drifted into Baltimore and Washington DC overnight, creating very unhealthy air quality with index values of 281 and 247, respectively, as of 6am eastern time. In New York City, air quality stood at an “unhealthy” 184 early on Friday, later improving to 124. Philadelphia and Cleveland had readings considered “very unhealthy” at about 260. Organizers of the World Cup final in East Rutherford, New Jersey, will be watching the smoke patterns carefully. Wildfire smoke kills tens of thousands of people each year, attacking nearly every system in the human body.
