CARDY: Donald Trump is blaming Canada for a fire he helped set
On July 17, Donald Trump called the smoke drifting south "totally unacceptable." He said Canada was "not properly maintaining" its forests. The United States, he wrote, is being "unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air." Then he threatened to bolt the cost of that air onto his tariffs. Not to be outdone, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno drafted a bill to sanction Canada over the weather, and four Michigan congressmen demanded "measurable plans."
Yup. Measurable plans for lightning.
More than 900 fires are burning in Canada right now. Most of the smoke comes from boreal forest in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Boreal forest burns. It always has. What's changed this year is the heat: longer droughts, hotter summers, more lightning. Every wildfire scientist looking at this season says the same thing: climate change. Trump knows this. He just won't say it out loud.
The men who want Canada to measure our fires are led by a President who fired roughly 3,400 U.S. Forest Service workers last year — 16 percent of the workforce. He froze the money for fuel-reduction projects, the exact thinning and prescribed burns his own senators now demand of us. His new budget cuts another $1.4 billion from the Forest Service.
Tired of watching Trump miss the forest for the trees? Look up.
In April 2025 he gutted NOAA's GeoXO satellite program, cutting two of six planned satellites and killing the one instrument built for this moment: a spectrometer that tracks wildfire smoke and warns people when the air will hurt them. Scientists valued that data at roughly $13 billion a year.
He cut about a thousand NOAA staff while he was at it. The smoke is thick. The hypocrisy is thicker.
What matters more than any insult: you cannot reason with a man who thinks Ottawa can control lightning. We have spent billions on fire prevention. It changes nothing, because smoke was never the point. Look at the Gordie Howe bridge. That was never about tolls either. Trump held the opening hostage until Ottawa handed Washington half the net toll revenue for 15 years and a say in setting the rates. The bridge was the lever. The smoke is this month's lever. Even our dairy industry — where the Americans have a real point about unfair practices — is just one more handle to grab.
We keep treating each attack as an argument to win. It isn't. It's a mood. Today it's forests. Tomorrow it'll be Canada geese — those filthy birds, crossing the border without papers, totally unacceptable, tariffs to follow. Have you seen what they did to the 12th green at Trump Doral? The day after, it'll be the "u" Canadians put in "colour." A humiliation. Tariffs to follow.
When the other side is irrational, the old rules stop working. Our politeness reads as weakness. Explanation reads as confession. Every Canadian instinct — apologize, clarify, find the win-win — becomes fuel.
We need new rules.
Stop defending. We did not summon the boreal forest into existence. We are fighting the largest fires in a generation with people who run toward them for a living. We owe no one an apology for our geography.
Name the crime. This is a shakedown dressed up as environmentalism, run by an administration that blinds itself to the smoke it claims to care about, and rolled back the rules on coal and pollution poured onto Americans on purpose.
Hit back. Trump respects leverage and nothing else. Energy, potash, uranium, critical minerals, the auto lines his workers depend on to eat. Canada is not a supplicant at his door. We are a supplier he cannot replace. Start acting like it.
For two years our slogan was "elbows up." A good slogan for a polite hockey country. That game is over. You do not throw a tidy elbow at a man swinging a folding chair.
Forget about elbows up. It's time for fists up.
Not because we want the fight. Because refusing it has not spared us one tariff, one insult, or one lungful of the smoke he is now too dishonest to measure. We tried reason. We tried patience.
The smoke will clear when the season turns. The neighbour won't. Pretending the U.S. is still a normal country means every decision we make rests on false information. That's the world as it is — the one Mr. Carney keeps talking about. Our job is to see it clearly and fight like hell for our interests.
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