US President Donald Trump has blamed Canadian authorities for wildfire smoke drifting into the United States, saying on Friday that the huge cost the US is incurring to tackle the pollution would be recovered from Canada and added to US tariffs on Canadian goods. Wildfires are burning in several parts of Canada, and the smoke spread across a wide area from the US Midwest to the north-east on Thursday and Friday, prompting local authorities to advise residents to stay indoors.
Trump’s relationship with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has always been tense. Calling Canada’s wildfire smoke drifting into the US a “completely unacceptable situation,” Trump said he would call Carney to ask what steps Canada was taking. On his own platform Truth Social, Trump wrote: “We are blaming Canada for not properly managing its own forests. This is exposing the United States to needlessly dirty, polluted and unhealthy air.” He said it was “deliberate negligence” now happening almost every year and costing the US billions of dollars, and that the cost of tackling the pollution must be added to existing US tariffs on Canadian goods.
Canada’s emergency management minister, Eleanor Olszewski, said the Canadian government had invested C$12 billion (about $8.56 billion) in forest conservation and wildfire prevention since 2020, as the country increasingly faces drier, warmer weather, and noted a long history of Canada-US cooperation on cross-border wildfires. “Our top priority right now is keeping Canadians safe and communities secure,” she said in a statement. Canada is home to one of the world’s largest forests; climate experts say rising temperatures in recent years have made its forests drier, increasing wildfires. Mike Flannigan, a wildfire expert at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, said: “The warmer the climate gets, the more extreme weather we see — and wildfires will increase.”
Soon after taking office in 2025, Trump imposed tariffs on several important goods imported from Canada. Carney’s office did not immediately react to Trump’s remarks, though on Thursday Carney said the US should do more to reduce the impact of climate change. Trump and Carney could meet during the FIFA World Cup final in New Jersey on Sunday. Most of Canada’s wildfires this year have been in Ontario, with the worst in remote, sparsely populated north-western areas reachable mainly by plane, where about 650,000 acres (about 2,630 square kilometres) of forest have burned and thousands have been evacuated. In the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation (also known as Collins First Nation) in north-west Ontario, almost everything burned in a wildfire, forcing residents to flee by boat to Thunder Bay. Local emergency-management leader Matthew Hoppe told Reuters: “There’s nothing left, so you can understand the community is deeply shaken, mentally devastated and disoriented.” Thunder Bay, a city of about 110,000 on the north shore of Lake Superior, about 1,300 km north-west of Toronto, has seen all its shelters fill up, its mayor Ken Boshcoff told Reuters. Ontario premier Doug Ford said the province would buy 11 new aircraft to fight the fast-spreading fires and rejected US politicians’ criticism that Canada’s response was inadequate. US wildfires are also worse than usual this year: according to the National Interagency Fire Center, about 3.7 million acres have burned so far, against a 10-year average of 2.7 million for the same period.
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