President Donald Trump has claimed Canadian wildfire smoke has poisoned American air and suggested Canada should pay damages or face tariffs as he ramped up his feud with the country’s prime minister.
Smoke from hundreds of fires burning in Ontario spread across a wide stretch of the country beginning Thursday, reaching the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Mid-Atlantic. Residents in affected states were told for days to stay inside where they could.
It is the second time in a week that Trump, 80, has linked the smoke to trade measures. He previously suggested Canada was not doing enough to fight the fires as haze settled over U.S. cities, the Daily Beast reported last Friday.
He returned to the subject on Sunday, telling reporters that he had raised the fires with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, 61, at the FIFA World Cup final in New Jersey, where the men had sat together.
“I told him, I mean, you got to stop these fires from coming in and, you know, poisoning our air,” Trump said. “Our air has been poisoned.”
“I have a good relationship with Mark Carney, but, you know, we got to stop the fires up there,” he said. “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.”
The president reserved his sharpest words for the situation in Michigan, where he said the haze had forced businesses to shut their doors. He pointed to Detroit, claiming car plants and other operations had gone dark. Nothing on that scale had happened in the past four or five years, he said.
Carney set out his government’s response in a post on X on Saturday. He said more than 5,300 firefighting personnel had been deployed, and that Canada was using data and advanced thermal imaging for real-time detection and mitigation.
About 5.9 million acres, or 2.4 million hectares, have burned in Canada this wildfire season, government figures show. Climate scientists say higher global temperatures are making wildfires more frequent and more intense worldwide.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada for comment. A spokesperson for the White House told the Beast: “Refer you to the President’s TRUTH.”
