The US Capitol, Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial are clouded in a smoky haze from wildfire smoke from Canada at the National Mall on July 17.Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty
This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
President Donald Trump is displeased and waging economic war with Canada yet again, this time because…our northern neighbor isn’t doing enough to fight the effects of climate change?
“We 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!” the chief executive wrote 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 and Pittsburgh. “Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal…costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.” (On Monday, Trump rolled out new 50 percent 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 to hike trade taxes in response to the wildfires.)
The president also revealed to the media that he had confronted Prime Minister Mark Carney during Sunday’s FIFA World Cup finals in New Jersey. “I told him, you know, you got to stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air,” said Trump. “If we can help them, we’ll help them. But maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs.” After some more rambling, the Donald hit on something of an inconvenient truth. “I never remembered this happening,” he added. “Over the last four or five years you saw it starting to take place. I never remembered it happening before.”
It’s almost like the climate is changing!
If you didn’t 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’s raging forest fires. Such criticism would have been warranted, in light of the stark gap between the PM’s climate-conscious rhetoric and his pro-fossil-fuel policy. What we’re actually seeing, however, is something far more craven: an attempt to seize upon one of the president’s most specific, oddest environmental fixations in order to rattle the imperial saber at the north’s Liberal government. By vaguely—and inaccurately—gesturing 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’s a way to attack Canada over climate change without ever using those words—and without even suggesting the real policies that would help North America avoid these forest-and-smoke cycles year after year.
Since the White House’s climate denial remains strong, it’s unclear just what it’s expecting Canada to do here—other than retaliate in ways that hit the US even harder.
It’s not the first time the MAGA-era GOP has scolded Canada thus. Last summer, Midwestern Republicans sent various letters to Ottawa over its “failure to prevent and control wildfires”—without, 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. Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno also offered to follow suit in his chamber, while Montana Rep. Tim Sheehy accused Canada of running its firefighting operations “like a Chinese protection racket,” in a message approvingly amplified by Trump.
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’s firefights. And since the White House’s climate denial remains strong, it’s unclear just what it’s expecting Canada to do here—other than retaliate in ways that hit the US even harder. Conservative Ontario Premier Doug Ford has already suggested that Ottawa should strike back proportionately: “tariff for tariff, dollar for dollar.”
Before this point, the administration’s policy toward Canada had been nothing less than a self-own. The constant trade-warring and “51st state” menacing bred such anti-American sentiment across Canada that our longtime friends in the north turned against us decisively—and effectively. Boycotts of US whiskey have decimated a key economic driver for the American South. Major cities throughout the States have seen crushing drops in Canadian tourism and business it affords to costly enterprises like ski resorts. 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 and building out oil-and-gas pipelines to increase energy exports to Asia.
Those pipelines will worsen the conditions that set off Canada’s devastating wildfires—but that’s not what Trump is worrying about at all. When the US president talks about “Debris Removal” and the “Brush” in forestry, he’s generally referring to prescribed or controlled burning, an Indigenous-pioneered environmental practice 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’s deadly Camp Fire and during last year’s Palisades burns. He’s not wrong about the merits of controlled burns, but he’s wrong that they’re 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.
Because Trump and his fellow Republicans view climate change as a hoax, they have zero solutions.
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’s; our neighbor’s fires generally arise in massive boreal forests, which do not have debris or brush concerns because they’ve 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 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—on the yearly basis that Trump and other Americans have come to experience this decade. And under a climate change–driven heat dome that fuels more storms, the forests are all the more susceptible to inopportune lightning strikes.
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 US witness every season. Remember this when you see the commander in chief posting about “climate fraud” (i.e., acknowledging that climate change is real) and international green policies. 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 from outdoor workers and shrinking public lands. They don’t 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—even 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.