Canada’s wildfires raise temperature on Trump-Carney relationship
The Hill · C · trust 35/100
Comments: by Mallory Wilson - 07/20/26 7:01 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Mallory Wilson - 07/20/26 7:01 PM ET Comments: Link copied NOW PLAYING President Trump has put Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on notice over the wildfire smoke that has shrouded over a dozen states, threatening tariffs and adding more strain to already fraught U.S.-Canada relations.
Trump has said the smoke from Canada’s wildfires has been “poisoning” the air in the U.S. and suggested that America’s northern neighbor wasn’t properly maintaining their forests.
Experts who spoke to The Hill on Monday said tariffs would not fix the underlying environmental factors causing more frequent and fierce wildfires.
“They’re not going to fix the problem, and you know I think threatening tariffs or imposing them just risks further kind of eroding the U.S.-Canada relationship, which has already been at a kind of a low point over the past year and a half,” said Imran Bayoumi, a deputy director and resident fellow with the GeoStrategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
“This kind of repeated behavior is only going to further drive a wedge between Washington and Ottawa and make it harder for cooperation to occur on issues where we need close bilateral coordination, like actually fighting wildfires,” he added.
According to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System , there are hundreds of active fires with new ones still popping up.
Trump sat with Carney while attending the World Cup final on Sunday and told reporters after the game that he raised the issue of U.S. air being “poisoned” by the wildfires.
Last week, Trump said the administration would be “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 cost is incalculable! Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result,” he added in the Truth Social post. “This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”
Trump was not alone among Republicans in threatening cross-border penalties over the air pollution.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) said he would be introducing legislation that would “sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity.”
Michigan Republican Reps. Jack Bergman, John James, Lisa McClain, and John Moolenaar also penned a joint letter to Carney sharing their frustration about how Canada has handled these fires.
“We are done accepting apologies in place of action. 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,” they wrote.
“That means our own agencies exploring direct involvement in cross-border fuel reduction and firefighting capacity,” they added. “It means reconsidering how much benefit of the doubt this relationship continues to earn on an issue where American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year.”
James also said in a social media post that he and Moreno would be sending a bill to Trump that would put 25 percent tariffs on Canada “to fund a victim compensation fund and pay for cleanup,” which would be in addition to sanctions.
Trump on Monday slapped Canada with additional 50 percent tariffs on certain goods in response to discriminatory measures taken by Canada against U.S. products, but a senior administration official told reporters that the tariffs were not connected to the wildfires, and that the president “has asked for options on that and options are being shared with him.”
Gary Hufbauer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, was skeptical Trump’s threats of wildfire tariffs would withstand legal scrutiny.
“He’s extremely hostile to Canada for reasons which go back to his personal problems with Justin Trudeau and have carried forward all these years, but I think of all the tariff threats he made, this is one of the least credible,” he said.
Hufbauer said that while Trump could issue an executive order to place these tariffs on Canada over the wildfire smoke, he said it would have “a very low chance of surviving in the courts.”
Ontario Premier Doug Ford called the wildfire criticism “absolutely unacceptable” and said Canada has helped the U.S. fight wildfires when it needed assistance.
“With all the assets the U.S. has, and he’s sitting there complaining,” Ford said of Trump at a press conference in Toronto Monday. “Why don’t you send up some water bombers? Why don’t you start helping us, like we would help you in a heartbeat?”
Eleanor Olszewski, minister of emergency management and community resilience for Canada, said Canada has invested $12 billion in forest sustainability and fire prevention since 2020, but the warmer, drier weather is increasing wildfire risk.
Carney, for his part, said last week that “climate change is the responsibility of everyone...including the United States.”
Speaking to reporters on Monday, the prime minister said he had a “series of conversations” with Trump about the wildfires over the weekend. He said he made clear the scale of Canada’s forests and current drought conditions that extend “from the equivalent of Texas all the way to Minnesota, to put it in American terms.”
Over 100 million Americans were under air quality alerts as the smoke blanketed parts of the country and released…
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