Donald Trump's hot air won't stop smoke from forest fires

No matter how much Trump threatens to “punish” Canada, his presidential musings matter little at this moment. Uncontrolled forest fires raging across Canada are indeed a natural disaster, but are they the man-made disaster that Trump claims?

“Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal,” Trump complained on social media, adding that he’d impose tariffs to recoup the “Billions of Dollars” it was costing America.

The president is hardly alone in wagging his finger at Canada. Other opportunistic politicians across America have also taken to the airwaves to chorus their complaints about foul air wafting across the border.

“American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction on wildfires, year after year,” Republican lawmakers from Michigan claimed last week.

Amid the hostile and hypocritical rhetoric, only the governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, reached out to offer help for Ontario, according to Doug Ford.

“Out of 50 states, I only had Gov. Healey ask, ‘Hey, how’s it going … can I help you with anything?’” the premier noted Monday.

To be sure, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz also offered kind words — after the OPP and Canadian Armed Forces were deployed to rescue American campers from a fire that started in the U.S. state. In fact, smoke and fire have crossed into Canada from Minnesota and California for years without complaint from this country.

Our response has been to send fire crews and water bombers without hesitation. Now, U.S. politicians are quick to point an accusing finger rather than extending a helping hand.

“When they had the infernal wildfires out in California, who was first there?” Ford asked rhetorically.

Ford noted acidly that more than 40,000 fires are raging across 3.9 million acres in America. Yet they have energy enough to blame Canada.

“Rather than criticize and threaten Canada, your closest friends, maybe one day you’re going to need our help, like you did last year.”

In America, everything environmental is political. And anything geographical is ideological.

The desire for clean air is completely understandable. When annual smog alerts became commonplace in Ontario a quarter-century ago, a new Liberal government accelerated the mothballing of coal-fired power plants — benefiting many American states.

Long before acrid smoke and smog, however, the Americans were sending acid rain our way. Rather than play politics, then-prime minister Brian Mulroney plied his diplomatic skills to persuade another U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, to sign a cross-border pact that benefited both sides.

That’s not to say Canada cannot now improve forest management. But it is too easy to conflate causes and effects on both sides of the border, and both sides of the argument.

Yes, global warming, emanating from America, bears much blame. Yet climate adaptation must also be part of our tool kit.

We cannot merely point to a rising thermometer and throw up our hands. If we are suffering from a perfect storm of bone-dry forests, high temperatures and lightning strikes, we cannot merely make excuses storm after storm, season after season.

Smoke crosses state and provincial borders all the time, cutting a swath from California to B.C., and from Alberta to Ontario. Some of the onslaught is the legacy of decades of well-intentioned malpractice, when naturally occurring forest fires were excessively suppressed, leaving a store of pent-up firepower on the forest floor.

If old stewardship practices have fallen short in changing times, we need to change with the times. The most substantive complaints have come from Indigenous communities pointing to poor communications and slow responses, yet their voices have been drowned out by the political carping from the U.S.

Only Trump believes there are easy answers and obvious villains. Yet hypocrisy is not a strategy.

In truth, firefighting techniques are little different in the U.S. and Canada. The bigger and more daunting difference is that our sprawling boreal forest is much more inaccessible, making it hard to tend from afar or respond in a flash to lightning strikes.

The prime minister and premiers are meeting in P.E.I. this week to discuss a national fire strategy. It’s worth noting that at previous midsummer meetings, the premiers of Ontario and Manitoba were forced to fly home when forest fires raged.

Currently, there are nearly 1,000 active wildfires across the country (including nearly 200 in northern Ontario); more than 2.9 million hectares have been destroyed so far. As they confer in Charlottetown, Canada’s politicians will feel the heat at their backs.