Trump threatens Canada with tariffs over wildfire smoke

Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on Canada over wildfire smoke choking US cities . ‘We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their forests and brush,’ the President wrote on Truth Social Friday. The US is being ‘ invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable ,’ Trump added. He vowed to call Prime Minister Mark Carney to demand answers, claiming that the ‘cost is incalculable.’ ‘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 said.

Fires that have been blazing in Canada’s Ontario province have caused massive plumes of smoke to blanket much of the US. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, Maryland and Washington, DC, have all seen major dips in air quality and pungent white smoke creep in from the northern border. The National Weather Service has issued air quality alerts in at least 16 states.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the air is now considered ‘hazardous’ from northern Minnesota to Columbus, Ohio – the agency’s most severe air quality rating. ‘Thousands of Canadians lives have been upended, are being upended, by the wildfires across this country,’ Carney said on Thursday. The smoke threatens to further derail relations between the US and Canada, which were already under strain from Trump’s repeated threats to turn its northern neighbor into its 51st state and uneasy trade relations.

Trump’s Republican backers were quick to support the President’s push for additional tariffs due to the fires. ‘Americans will not pay the price for the negligence of Canadian leaders,’ Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno wrote on X. ‘Four years in a row of record fires that have produced decades of environmental damage. Further proof that you dont have to be very smart to get elected as a liberal, you just have to be woke.’