So here in Ladysmith, we’ve (so far) not had to deal with too much wildfire smoke. Certainly not like past years, when the air tasted like campfire. We can still have the windows open. The air is West Coast fresh. No concerns here for wildfire smoke tariffs.
But not everywhere is as blessed as us. We were just in Southern Ontario a few days ago, and the sky there really was doing the full traffic cone. Like, aggressively orange. You know, the colour of that guy’s skin. You know of whom I speak. The Assaulter-in-Chief. Anyway, that was Toronto in July, looking like Mars had a bad day.
Manageable. That’s the word I keep coming back to, for us here at home anyway. We’re the lucky ones this year. And I want to say that up front, because what I’m about to write comes from a place of “we got off easy,” not “woe is me.” Keep that in your back pocket. It matters in a second.
Wildfire Smoke Tariffs? Really?
Because apparently, four provinces over and one very large border away, the President of the United States, Pumpkin-Spiced Stalin, looked up at his own hazy sky last week and decided the appropriate response was… wildfire smoke tariffs? Not “hey, can we send more water bombers,” not “let’s talk prevention funding.” Tariffs.
He posted that Canada is guilty of “Willful Negligence” for not maintaining our “Forests, and Brush,” and that the cost of America’s “filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air” would be tacked onto the tariffs we’re already paying. As usual, I digress into fact-checking mode here, but I promise it’s relevant: those capital letters are his, not mine. I couldn’t make that up if I tried, and Lord knows I’ve tried to be funnier than reality plenty of times on this blog. Reality wins again.
And then, because one moron yelling into a phone camera wasn’t enough, four members of Congress from Michigan sent an actual, signed, letterhead-and-everything letter to Prime Minister Carney. Three pages! Demanding “specifics, not sentiment,” and warning that the US might just start “acting on its own” in our forests if we don’t get our act together. I read the whole thing, and I kept waiting for the part where they mention what Canada’s actually doing. Spoiler: there isn’t one. Weird, right? Who’da thunk a strongly worded letter could be that long and say that little.
Oh, wait. I keep forgetting who I’m talking about…
The Low Hanging Fruit of Social Media
And it’s not just the letter. Scroll through social media for five minutes and you’ll find no shortage of folks confidently explaining that Canada just refuses to “manage” its forests, that we’re letting arsonists run wild, that a bit of raking would sort the whole thing out. None of it holds up to about ten seconds of actual looking into it, and yet it gets shared and reshared like gospel. I don’t know what it is, but there does seem to be a certain segment of the online commentariat, bless their hearts, who comb their hair with a brick. Confidently wrong, loudly wrong, and somehow never curious enough to check.
Two words they’ve never used together in a sentence: critical. thinking.
Here’s where I stop being cute about it, because this is where it stops being cute.
Canada has sent firefighters south more times than I or anyone else can count on both hands. Quebec crews flew down to help California burn crews back in 2020. When those brutal 2023 fires here at home stretched us to the breaking point, the United States sent over two thousand of its own wildland firefighters north to help us out, and we were deeply, genuinely grateful for it. And this past January, when Southern California was on fire again, Canada sent our own people, our own air tankers, right back down.
That’s not a favour we did once for good PR. That’s how this relationship has worked for decades. It’s called mutual aid, and it exists because nobody, not one country on this or any other continent, can fight wildfire alone anymore. Canada can’t. Certainly not the US. Not with fire seasons getting longer and meaner every single year.
The Cost of Service
And it costs us. Just last week, a helicopter pilot named Nicholas Dale, fifty-six years old, from Sooke, right here on Vancouver Island, died when his helicopter went down fighting a fire in Colorado. He wasn’t drafted. He wasn’t ordered south by some bureaucrat. Nicholas went because that’s what you do when your neighbour’s house is on fire, and he never came home. So forgive me if I bristle a little when the same country he died helping protect turns around and calls us negligent, demanding we pay wildfire smoke tariffs.
So when Ontario Premier Doug Ford, of all people, tells American politicians to quit “chirping” at us and maybe send some help instead? Yeah. That’s the whole ballgame, right there, in one perfect word. Chirping. I’m stealing that word forever, and I fully expect to use it the next time Beth-Rose critiques my driving, which she does with the confidence of someone who has been driving for less than a year.
So this is the part where I gently (not gently) lose my mind about the “properly maintain your forests” line. Our boreal forest and the wilderness around it stretches across about 60 percent of the country, coast to coast. Most of America’s forestland has roads running through it, logging roads, fire roads, access for trucks and crews. Ours, way up north where most of these fires actually burn? Nothing. No roads. No towns. Just trees, muskeg, and lots of very confused, very angry moose, for thousands and thousands of kilometres.
Smokey the Bear’s Canadian Minions
So sure, let’s all get right on “maintaining” that. I’ll grab a rake. Heck, I’ll grab two rakes, one for each hand, and together we will personally walk from the Yukon border to Hudson Bay tidying up the forest floor like Smokey the Bear’s unpaid interns. Should only take us, oh, the rest of all of our natural lives and several future generations of our progeny. Good talk, Mr. Tangerine Toddler.
And look, I’d have an easier time swallowing the outrage if the same administration threatening us over smoke hadn’t spent this year pulling America out of the Paris Agreement, walking away from the IPCC and the UN’s climate change framework, and gutting the very agencies that track and predict this stuff.
You can’t formally declare that climate change isn’t your problem in January and then, six months later, send four congressmen and a President to blame us for a wildfire season that’s getting worse because of, oh I don’t know, climate change. Your constant climate denialism is tedious and dangerous. You don’t get to opt out of the cause and try to bill us for the smoke.
I’m not saying our forestry management is perfect. It isn’t. Nobody’s is. But we didn’t set these fires on purpose to ruin somebody’s Fourth of July cookout, and we’ve shown up, boots on the ground, every single time the US has needed us. That’s not nothing. That’s not sentiment, either, since apparently that word’s a dirty one for some folks in Michigan these days. Isn’t that just what neighbours do?
A Suggestion for Cheeto Benito
So I suggest you take your wildfire smoke tariffs and stick them where the sun don’t shine. And I don’t mean a sun obscured by that filthy Canadian wildfire smoke…
So anyway. The sky’s not orange here today and, from what I hear, a little less so in Ontario too. Heather and I are still leaving the windows open at night. But I’ll be watching the news out of Washington with one eyebrow permanently raised, waiting to see if “specifics, not sentiment” ever gets applied to anyone’s own backyard.
Not holding my breath…get it?
