President Donald Trump was just talking about imposing more tariffs on Canadian goods as a result of the wildfires that continue to rage across northern Ontario. On Tuesday morning, Canadians woke up to potential tariffs of 50% on exports from wine to hockey sticks.
Seems that exporting all that toxic smoke to a large swath of the American northeast was another tipping point for Trump who apparently took time during the championship game of the FIFA soccer tournament to lecture Prime Minister Carney about his complete lack of interest in arresting the wildfires that continue to burn out of control.
Trump is right to take offense: Carney has demonstrated an enormous degree of reckless irresponsiblity in failing to either prevent or combat these wildfires.
Asked about the situation just before he boarded Air Force One, Trump said, “I told them, I mean, you got to stop these fires from coming in and you know poisoning our air. Our air has been poisoned. Have a good relationship with Mark Carney, but you know we got to stop the fires up there. If we can help them, we'll help them. But maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs. But it was terrible. I mean, you had businesses closing, in particular Michigan. If you look at Detroit, the Detroit, Michigan area, they had to close everything. They had to close car plants and a lot of other things. So I've never remembered this happening over the last four or five years.”
Carney has announced no plan except to reiterate that Canada remains committed to fighting climate change. And as for the tariffs, Carney has promised to “intensify” trade negotiations.
That’s been the line of the Canadian government for the last decade during recurring seasons of wildfires. Successive Canadian governments have insisted that the fires are inevitable because of climate change – even though there is no real evidence that climate change is responsible for the carnage.
Liberal governments have failed Canadians on two levels. They have refused to practice responsible forest management to prevent forest fires and they have then failed to provide the resources to fight the fires when they erupt.
In 2021, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to hire 1,000 new federal firefighters that would be available to counter wildfire threats anywhere in Canada. As part of the $500 million plan, he also pledged to buy more water bombers – a resource that a country of Canada that is largely composed of forests should have in abundance.
Trudeau’s plan was another bit of election fakery and never came to fruition. Instead, Trudeau and his environment minister, the radical Steven Guilbeault, continued to blame climate change for the continuing fires – including a devastating one that destroyed much of Jasper National Park in Alberta in 2024 – and have offered a chronically inadequate emergency response. Guilbeault infamously said of the catastrophe at Jasper that there was “no stopping this fire.”
The forest management service at Jasper National Park had warned the federal government for years of the impending disaster on these pristine lands. The Liberals chose to do nothing except watch, believing intervention was somehow an invasion of Mother Earth’s domain.
Isn’t it ironic that leftist governments who believe in intervening in the economy with endless regulations and accelerating taxes and who believe in intervening in our lives with censorship and surveillance legislation don’t believe in intervening to stop wild fires?
This policy and mindset has been exposed as both politically motivated, utter nonsense and always dangerous to the public good. The Liberals have used wildfires as a rallying cry for the imagined perils of climate change that offer a perverse opportunity to demonstrate how global warming continues to be an existential threat.
And so many of these fires have been the result of arson, sometimes by demented people who threaten the lives and livelihood of Canadians to falsely promote their political cause. But even if you believe this devastation can all be attributed to climate change, shouldn’t you nonetheless proactively prepare to contain the consequences? Of course, but the LIberals have failed here too.
Instead of buying more water bombers from De Havilland, the historic Canadian aviation firm sold a $1 billion of the aircraft to European countries. Instead of protecting Canadian forests, the Liberal governments of Trudeau and Carney have sent $26 billion to Ukraine to prop up the corrupt regime of President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Liberals could also have prevented these fires through responsible forest management. They could have dealt with the massive undergrowth that is a literal bedding of kindling waiting to explode in flames. They could have started controlled, preventative fires in the most vulnerable sectors of the forest. They could have allowed responsible logging to harvest some of the trees that would otherwise go up in smoke. Instead, they followed a path of most resistance, arguing that nature should be allowed to pursue its own course and that logging is a toxic and ravenous industry that feeds off the wilds. These are irrational responses to an impending threat are grounded in equally irrational ideology.
So, I have enormous empathy with Trump’s anger over Canada’s pathetic response to these latest wildfires. The Trudeau-Carney regime has demonstrated consistent incompetence and idiocy in the face of these annual disasters.
Canada must now face the consequences and had better start improving its response and changing its policies.
