Trump is threatening Canada with tariffs over wildfire smoke — yes, really
With nearly 1,000 wildfires burning in Canada and US cities under hazardous air alerts, Trump says new tariffs on Ottawa could be the answer.
Trump threatened Canada with new tariffs on Friday — not over steel, cars or dairy, but over smoke. With nearly 1,000 wildfires burning across Canada, millions of people in North America have spent days breathing air rated hazardous, and the US president has decided Ottawa should get the bill.
How bad is the smoke, really?
Bad. Hazardous air quality alerts were back in force on Monday for Chicago, Detroit, Columbus and Minneapolis. New York finally caught a break after what officials are calling the second-worst smoke event in the city’s modern history. Live air readings are on AirNow, the official US air-quality service.
On the Canadian side, Prime Minister Mark Carney is juggling the fire emergency with his push to expand the country’s energy sector — and can now add a trade threat to the pile. Relations between the two leaders have seen better days, though also lighter ones: just yesterday they shared a box at the World Cup final.
Could the tariffs actually happen?
With Trump, the threat often is the policy — and no details were announced: no rates, no product lists, no dates. What remains is the novel principle of holding a neighbour commercially liable for smoke carried on the wind. Canada, it is worth noting, does not control the weather.
For readers in Portugal the story rings familiar: summers of fire and extreme heat have already pushed Europe into public-health emergency mode — though around here, when smoke crosses a border, the usual response is borrowing a water bomber, not threatening tariffs.
Image: Ymblanter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
