Donald Trump threatened this Friday to increase tariffs on Canada. The president blamed the neighboring country for the forest fires that are covering the northeastern United States in smoke and keeping more than 100 million people under air quality alerts.
“This is a case of deliberate negligence that is becoming an annual phenomenon and costing the United States billions of dollars; the cost of this pollution must necessarily be added to the tariffs that Canada currently pays,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform.
In the same post, he held Canada responsible for not “properly maintaining its forests and the underbrush they contain” and stated that its authorities “have refused to carry out basic forest management and debris removal tasks, knowing that such a refusal would lead precisely to this result.”
Smoke from wildfires in northwestern Ontario covers the Toronto sky.
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In addition to the economic warning, Trump announced that he would call Prime Minister Mark Carney to demand explanations regarding a situation he described as “totally unacceptable.” The relationship between both leaders had already been strained since early 2025, when Washington imposed tariffs on key Canadian imports and Ottawa responded with countermeasures.
Carney’s office did not immediately respond to the statements. On Thursday, the head of government had attributed the worsening of extreme temperatures to climate change and pointed out that the United States could do more to combat it.
According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC), there are 897 active fires across the country, 207 of which are out of control, and the smoke continues to move south driven by the winds.
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The most serious situation is concentrated in Ontario, where more than 80 fires are out of control, as confirmed this Friday by Doug Ford, who heads the provincial government. The province, located in the east of the country, requested federal aid and is receiving reinforcements from firefighters from other regions. More than 80 air tankers and helicopters are deployed in the area, and other aircraft are ready to evacuate remote towns inhabited mainly by indigenous communities. So far there are no casualties.
Wildfire smoke maintains air quality alerts in 18 states and the District of Columbia, while Detroit, Chicago, and Washington are among the most polluted cities.
Since the beginning of the year, nearly 2.8 million hectares have burned in Canada, compared to the almost 1.6 million recorded just a week earlier. Although the season is less intense than that of 2023—a record year—or 2025, the strength of the flames has worsened significantly in recent days.
That progress translates directly into the air quality crisis being experienced on the U.S. side of the border. The National Weather Service (NWS) maintains alerts in the Great Lakes region, extending to New England and the Mid-Atlantic, covering 18 states and the District of Columbia. Detroit, Chicago, and Washington were among the most polluted cities in the world as of 5:00 PM GMT on Friday, according to the Swiss company IQAir.
Canadian weather services warned that, despite a temporary improvement during Friday morning in Toronto, conditions “will become very bad again” at night and could persist throughout the weekend.
