Americans Are Tired of Canada’s Forest Fire Smoke. It’s Time to Do Something About It.

Summer after summer is being marred by noxious fumes descending from Canada, and I have had enough.

Sorry, I’m a little grumpy but I can’t help it. The sky is yellow, my headache won’t go away, I haven’t been outside in days, and the reason is that our snooty, supposedly climate-conscious neighbor up north can’t handle its business.

For anyone living in the northern half of the United States I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Those in the Mid-Atlantic will soon.

Once again, raging, out-of-control Canadian forest fires have created air quality conditions worse than Delhi throughout much of our country.

Here’s a little tour of pictures from American cities in the past few days that look like they are stills from the next Blade Runner movie.

Chicago.

Buffalo.

New York City.

Finally, Detroit.

It’s downright dystopian. And no small matter for quality of life in America. The toxic smoke is a huge hazard leading to all kinds of nasty health conditions, ER visits, and even a few deaths.

Not to mention that it’s causing a plethora of negative, downstream economic effects.

Their problem has become our problem that we need to seriously consider rectifying. More on that in a bit.

Now you know what the Left and their allies in the media are going to say.

This is all because of man-made climate change. If only those ignorant, red state Americans would stop driving those gas guzzling SUVs and set their A/C to over 78 degrees during heat waves then we wouldn’t have so many fires.

But this is nonsense.

The number of forest fires in the Americas has been decreasing for half a century. The reason we seem to have more fires is because generally poor forest management has created conditions that lead to massive, towering infernos. Those cause more suffering than lots of smaller, but controlled burns.

Kenneth Green, writing for the Fraser Institute in 2023, argued that Canada’s fires are a product of poor forest management, not climate change.

He pointed to a 2020 study in the journal Progress in Disaster Science that found that “Canada has failed to fund the proactive management of forest fires sufficiently and is not poised to do better moving forward.”

This has been a problem in the U.S., too, as environmentalist ideas that have plagued federal and state governments over the decades have led to a regression in forest management techniques well known to our forefathers.

In Canada, they have more forests to burn.

Unfortunately, nearly all forested land is owned by the government. Hence, not much changes.

Even if we accept that global temperatures are rising—by the hand of man or naturally—Canada has responded poorly to the fire threat.

Frankly, if everything climate doomers said were true, and we take them at their word that they are most worried about carbon emissions being pumped into the atmosphere, then there is no excuse for not making aggressive forest management a top priority.

In 2023 the worst year of Canadian forest fires (so far), an estimated 3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere.

That’s around five times what the entire Canadian economy produced that year.

So, all the best laid plans of mice and men and globalist climate engineers haven’t accounted for the overwhelming effect of forest fires that are natural, but containable. They demand that our lives get upended but fail to handle basic governance.

Canada could literally shut down their entire economy and force their people to live in mud huts and that wouldn’t even come close to offsetting the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by a single bad fire season.

I guess it’s easier for Canadian politicians to put the squeeze on the country’s oil producers and blame America—their national pastime—than address this growing fire problem, that’s increasingly our problem too.

Maybe it’s time for us to motivate them to do something.

Canada currently has only a tiny force of water bombers that they’ve struggled to expand.

We have a huge air wing of B-1 and B-2 bombers that I’m sure can be diverted for a few days to drop massive payloads of “water” on their country.

OK, I kid, I kid.

I told you I was cranky.

But we really should do something to pressure Canada to act since they seem to be about as committed to solving this issue as California is to building a functioning bullet train.

Kevin Kijewski, a Republican attorney who ran for Michigan attorney general office, had an interesting idea.

He wrote in 2025 that the Canadian smoke has done enormous damage to the health of Michiganders and has caused the state’s tourism industry to lose tens of millions of dollars.

Kijewski noted that the 1991 U.S.-Canada Air Quality Agreement, “which commits both nations to prevent and reduce transboundary air pollution that harms public health and the environment,” could be used to motivate Canada to deal with the fire problem or face additional economic consequences.

The State Department, under the terms of the treaty, can “advocate for remedies such as compensatory tariffs on Canadian timber imports or other trade measures until Ottawa demonstrates improved wildfire prevention and suppression.”

Maybe it’s time for President Donald Trump to turn up the heat on Canada since they seem so lackadaisical in turning it down and putting it out.