The Canadian province of Manitoba is suffering through its worst wildfire season in its history, and to add insult to injury, several U.S. lawmakers are complaining that smoke wafting south is making it difficult for Americans to enjoy summer.
Six Republican Congress members shared their concerns in a letter addressed to Canadian Ambassador Kirsten Hillman on Monday, July 7, asking for more information about how the government plans to mitigate wildfires and the smoke that travels south. Since January, over 3,000 wildfires have consumed more than 5 million acres, killed two people, and displaced tens of thousands more in Canada. The lawmakers explain that resulting poor air quality in the U.S. has prevented Americans from partaking in outdoor summer activities. Compared to the devastation Canadians have faced this year, these issues are glaringly trivial.
“This is what turns people off politics. When you’ve got a group of congresspeople trying to trivialise and make hay out of a wildfire season where we’ve lost lives in our province,” Wab Kinew, premier of Manitoba, said during a press conference Thursday, July 10. Manitoba had just declared a state of emergency for the second time this year due to unprecedented wildfire activity. The province’s wildfire service reported 105 active fires burning on Thursday, including 14 that were listed as “out of control” across the eastern, western, and northern parts of the province.
Still, the lawmakers—Tom Tiffany and Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin and Michelle Fischbach, Brad Finstad, Pete Stauber, and Tom Emmer of Minnesota—suggest Canada should be doing more to manage this ongoing crisis. “While we know a key driver of this issue has been a lack of active forest management, we’ve also seen things like arson as another way multiple large wildfires have ignited in Canada,” the letter reads. “With all the technology that we have at our disposal, both in preventing and fighting wildfires, this worrisome trend can be reversed if proper action is taken.”
The letter provides no evidence to back up accusations of poor forest management. While some experts have made this claim before, Canada is recognized as a global leader in sustainable forest management, applying it across roughly 91% of the country’s 857 million acres of forest land. What’s more, the lawmakers make no mention of climate change as a significant driver of increasingly frequent and intense wildfires.
“We know that the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change have contributed to increasing the hot, dry conditions that lead to more unmanageable fires,” Rebecca Saari, who serves as a Canada research chair in global change, atmosphere, and health as well as an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Waterloo, told Gizmodo. For example, during the 2023 wildfire season—Canada’s worst on record—climate change doubled the likelihood of extreme fire weather in Quebec, Saari explained.
“That extreme weather led to higher risk, which created the mixture that led to the really high smoke levels in parts of the eastern U.S. that we saw in 2023,” she said. “So we know it’s happened in the past. And we expect that climate change will—this century—double the risks of unmanageable fires in parts of Canada.”
The U.S. is among the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters. In 2022, it produced nearly nine times more carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion than Canada, according to the International Energy Agency. It’s no surprise that the Republican lawmakers did not include this context in their letter. Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his administration have worked to erase any mention of climate change from federal websites and correspondence.
Just like greenhouse gas emissions, wildfire smoke knows no borders. As U.S. emissions continue to raise global temperatures, Canadian wildfire smoke will continue wafting southward and posing risks to Americans’ health, particularly in states close to the U.S.-Canada border such as Michigan, North Dakota, and Minnesota. The risks, however, will be far greater for Canadians living near the sources of this smoke, as the impact on air quality decreases as distance from the fire increases. For example, “fires in the Canadian prairies are [causing] hazardous air pollution levels there. Downwind, in the plumes reaching North Dakota and Minnesota, they are less polluted,” Saari explained.
What’s more, U.S. air pollution already significantly harms Canadians’ health. A 2024 study found that one in five premature deaths in Canada due to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure—the main air pollutant in wildfire smoke—are attributable to U.S. sources. The researchers also found that more than half of premature deaths due to ozone exposure in Canada were linked to U.S. sources.
Tarryn Elliot, a spokeswoman for the Canadian embassy in Washington D.C., told the BBC the embassy had received the letter and shared it with the relevant Canadian agencies. “We will respond in due course,” she said. It’s unclear exactly what U.S. lawmakers expect Canada to do with their complaints. The government has already responded aggressively to this crisis, convening a high-level Incident Response Group, triggering national mobilization of firefighting forces, and deploying military personnel to support air evacuations. The Canadian government “takes the prevention, response, and mitigation of wildfires very seriously,” Elliot said.
Instead of pointing the finger at a nation in crisis, it’s time for the U.S. to take a good, hard look at how its emissions are contributing to worsening wildfire conditions in Canada and other parts of the world, too. Perhaps then, summers will become safer and more enjoyable for everyone.
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