Hot air coming from U.S. absurd

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/08/2025 (221 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winds change, weather patterns shift, and it’s fair to say no one is ever completely sure what the meteorological outlook will be in the days and weeks ahead.

But if there’s one thing that’s certain in this overheated Canadian summer, it’s this: somewhere in this country, every day, there are communities choking under a thick blanket of wildfire smoke.

Across Canada, mostly in the Prairies and most particularly in Manitoba, it seems, smoke has become so much a part of daily summertime life that air-quality alerts are routinely included in weather forecasts.

In addition to being an annoyance that diminishes the quality of life and, in its most intense manifestations, is a potential health hazard, wildfire smoke is an almost-daily reminder of the consequences of climate change.

As the planet continues to warm as a result of humanity’s relentless poisoning of the atmosphere, summers have become hotter and drier, drought has become more prevalent and the conditions have been created in Canada’s vast wilderness for fires that can spread with dizzying speed.

And as we grapple with the realities of this environmental reckoning, the one thing we don’t need is to be subjected to the gripes and hollow indignations of ill-informed individuals seeking to exploit the deepening climate crisis for spurious political gain.

That, however, is exactly what arrived last month in the form of a letter penned to Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. from Republican congressional representatives Tom Tiffany, Brad Finstad, Tom Emmer, Michelle Fischbach, Glenn Grothman and Pete Stauber of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Their jointly signed missive complained that wildfire smoke from Canada is crossing the border into their states and robbing their constituents of their ability to enjoy the summer.

“Our constituents have been limited in their ability to go outside and safely breathe due to the dangerous air quality the wildfire smoke has created,” the letter states. “In our neck of the woods, summer months are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with family and creating new memories, but this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things.”

Citing arson and mismanagement of forest resources as the causes of wildfires that have become more frequent and widespread in recent years — but, rather notably, not mentioning climate change at all — the U.S. politicians urged Canada to take “proper action” to reduce the amount of smoke flowing over the border.

What complete and utter nonsense.

It should be noted, of course, that all six of these Trump-supporting representatives recently voted in favour of the U.S. president’s controversial “big, beautiful” budget bill, which delivers tax cuts to the wealthy but cuts funding for renewable energy projects and provides incentives for ramped-up production of fossil fuels.

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew quite rightly reacted immediately to the junk-mail delivery. “This is what turns people off from politics,” he said, “when you’ve got a group of congresspeople trying to trivialize and make hay out of a wildfire season where we’ve lost lives in our province. There’s no place for that in politics.”

There shouldn’t be, but in the current version of the GOP led by a president who sought to politicize last winter’s California wildfires by blaming that state’s Democratic governor for the devastation, there most certainly seems to be a place for partisan nonsense-based posturing.

Perhaps they could do their northern neighbours a favour by keeping their opinions on their own side of the Canada-U.S. divide. We’ve got enough problems dealing with wildfire smoke in our atmosphere without having to worry about a bunch of noxious hot air drifting northward across the border.