Republicans blame Canada for wildfire smoke ‘suffocating’ the U.S.

TORONTO — Smoke from Canadian wildfires is casting a shadow for many Americans this summer, a group of six Republican lawmakers say, and they want Canada to answer for it.

“In our neck of the woods, summer months are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with family, and creating new memories,” the U.S. representatives from Wisconsin and Minnesota wrote in a letter this week. “But this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things.”

Their letter, addressed to Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, demanded to know her government’s plan for tackling the wildfires and accused it of lax forest management that has contributed to “suffocating” smoke.

“Our communities shouldn’t suffer because of poor decisions made across the border,” Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., one of the letter’s authors, said in a post on social platform X. Canada’s government said it was reviewing the letter and planned to offer a response. The letter was also signed by Reps. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin and Brad Finstad, Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer and Michelle Fischbach of Minnesota.

Tarryn Elliott, a spokesperson at the Canadian Embassy, said in an email that “Canada takes the prevention, response, and mitigation of wildfires very seriously.”

The premier of Manitoba province in western Canada, where wildfires have been particularly bad and killed two people in May, blasted the letter by the U.S. lawmakers. The official, Wab Kinew, told reporters Thursday that the lawmakers were “trying to trivialize and make hay out of a wildfire season where we’ve lost lives in our province.”

The U.S. lawmakers also partly blamed arson for the wildfires, but the vast majority of the blazes are actually caused by lightning. Many of the areas where fires burn are in areas so remote that forest management techniques to lessen their severity, such as prescribed burns and thinning combustible plant matter, are not possible.

About 45% of Canada’s forests that are on public land are managed, while 30% are not, according to the federal government.

Fire is also an important natural process in boreal forest ecosystems, helping create openings in the tree canopy that allow sunlight to reach smaller plants and enriching the soil with burned plant matter.

Canada, which is home to some of the world’s largest tracts of boreal forests, is accustomed to the seasonal rhythm of wildfires, but the country’s annual fire season became a major issue in the United States in 2023. That year, when wildfires burned more land in Canada than had ever been recorded, smoke from uncontrollable flames, particularly across Quebec, was so intense it turned the skies over New York City a frightening shade of orange.

Michael Waddington, a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who studies the interaction between wildfires and forested lands, said a warming climate was turning those landscapes into a tinderbox.

“The United States is, for the most part, the main reason for that,” said Waddington, referring to the U.S. role in planet-warming greenhouse emissions. China is the largest emitter.

President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement in 2020 during his first presidency and again this past January, a few months after he was reelected.

While Canadian officials do not expect this year’s wildfires to be as bad as they were two years ago, burning forests did trigger air quality warnings in May and June in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

So far this year, almost 12 million acres, an area about twice the size of Vermont, have burned and more than 30,000 people were forced to temporarily evacuate their homes. Manitoba, one of the harder hit western provinces, declared a state of emergency Thursday for the second time this year because of wildfires.