Blame Canada For Their Dumb Hot Wildfires

When President Donald Trump floated the idea of Canada becoming our 51^st state, the Left lost its collective mind on both sides of the border.

A group of Democratic House members warned that the president’s rhetoric threatens to leave us alone to face other challenges we cannot overcome on our own. U.S. Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-CA) denounced the “childish threats” as “certainly not strategic.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared, “Canada thrives because we are Canadian.”

Fast forward to the present day, and hazardous smoke from over 800 Canadian wildfires is billowing across American skies. As of Friday, air quality alerts were in effect across at least 17 states, imperiling the health of more than 125 million Americans. On a scale of 0 to 500, the air quality rating eclipsed 800 in Toledo, Ohio, on Thursday night.

Funny, the chorus of warnings from the Left about reckless behavior has gone quiet. So much for “challenges we cannot overcome on our own.”

These fires are not new, and neither are the consequences. In 2023, Canadian wildfires emitted more carbon (647 million metric tons) than the annual output of all but three countries worldwide.

How does this keep happening, and who is to blame?

The Left, as they are wont to do for almost anything, points the finger at climate change. In 2023, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer declared, “These Canadian wildfires are truly unprecedented, and climate change continues to make these disasters worse. We passed the Inflation Reduction Act to fight climate change, and we must do more to speed our transition to cleaner energy and reduce carbon in the atmosphere.”

In early 2025, while fires in California were claiming 30 lives, forcing more than 180,000 people to flee their homes and costing an estimated $100 billion in damage, California Governor Gavin Newsom told his constituents that “climate change is here and it is real.”

Schumer and Newsom are right. Climate change is the cause of these fires. Only not in the way they are suggesting.

Just as the threat of “carbon emissions” has been used to justify sweeping changes to the American way of life (Barack Obama’s attempt to ban coal, Newsom’s efforts to eliminate gas-powered vehicles, Biden’s IRA boondoggle), the Canadians have used it to mismanage their forests. Roughly 38% of Canada’s land consists of forest, significantly more than the U.S, and 94% of those forests are publicly owned.

On its government website, Canada proudly declares its “forest laws are among the strictest in the world,” adding, “by law, forest management plans must be approved before harvesting starts.”

For the last decade-plus, Canada’s government has been run by leftists, first Justin Trudeau, who was succeeded by Carney in 2025. During his tenure, Trudeau repeatedly downplayed forest management, denouncing an “attack on experts, and on science” in favor of his preferred villain of the climate polluters.

In one 2024 House of Commons debate over forest management, Trudeau intoned that, “if we do not act in fighting against climate change with everything we have, then there will be no economy of the future.”

Forget about the economy of the future. These fires threaten Canada’s very existence today.

When the government fails to manage the forests, the consequences are steep. When forests are unmanaged and unattended, they burn.

Long after these fires are extinguished and the air returns to normal, the dangerous mentality of the climate cult will persist on both sides of the border.

Even after all his state has been through, Newsom, one of the Democratic Party’s wannabe standard-bearers, is still claiming, “greenhouse gases cause climate change and endanger our communities and our health.”

Never mind the children, pregnant women, and those with respiratory conditions in our country today, who are worried about the air they are breathing.

Climate change is the linchpin excuse for failed government. Remember that the next time Gavin Newsom comes after your gas car. Or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani urges you to set your air conditioning at 78 degrees during a heatwave. Or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says that data centers are dirty.

The real threat is the failure of leadership. That failure can be deadly, and the symptoms manifest themselves in different ways, but the cause is rooted in climate politics. Given their current plight, perhaps it’s a blessing that Canada did not become our 51^st state after all.

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Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. He also runs a sheep and cattle farm in rural Virginia.  Contact him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @DanielTurnerPTF