As Canada’s forests burn—again—the smoke doesn't just drift southward across the border. It descends into the political discourse like a smothering fog, choking off nuance, fact, and accountability. What should be a sobering reminder of a planet in distress has instead become a theatrical production, with Canadian premiers and American politicians playing their assigned roles. The forests may be ablaze, but it’s the performance that draws the real heat.
Take the Premier of Manitoba, who, flanked by emergency officials and the soft orange glow of particulate-choked sunlight, recently delivered a speech that could’ve been generated by a government chatbot trained on “Thoughts and Prayers” templates. There was vague concern, carefully-worded optimism, and a conspicuous absence of anything resembling the word climate. I expected him to blame the fires on “mismanaged leaf piles” or “a particularly aggressive solstice.”
It’s not as though the Premier is alone in his avoidance. Across Canada, there’s a bipartisan allergy to naming the crisis. To acknowledge that the wildfires—record-breaking in scale and frequency—are part of an accelerating climate emergency would require more than speeches. It would require decisions. Expensive and unpopular ones that challenge powerful interests.
Meanwhile, in the United States, where wildfires are supposed to be their problem, some Republican lawmakers have seized the moment with the subtlety of a leaf blower. As smoke from Northern Ontario and Quebec blanketed New York City last summer, Fox News anchors clutched pearls over “Canadian air pollution” while GOP representatives floated the theory that the smoke wasn’t merely accidental, but intentional. One even mused on air that “foreign smoke infiltration” might be part of a “globalist plot to push green tyranny.”
And who sits atop this fictional axis of smoke and evil? The villain of choice is Mark Carney: former central banker, climate finance czar, and the kind of technocratic figure whose very competence makes him suspect in certain corners of the right-wing imagination. To them, Carney represents everything nefarious: carbon markets, international cooperation, data. If a wildfire spreads and no one mentions ESG, did it even burn?
The idea that Carney’s secretly orchestrating Canadian wildfires to soften up the American Midwest for a global carbon tax is laughable—until you realize how many people are taking it seriously. The very concept of atmospheric causality has become politicized: if smoke affects you, it must be someone’s fault. Preferably someone foreign, liberal, and fluent in macroeconomics.
And so the fires burn, and burn, and burn. Indigenous communities in Northern Canada evacuate again, many for the fourth or fifth time in as many years. Entire ecosystems are collapsing in a feedback loop of drought, heat, and combustion. And in cities from Winnipeg to Washington, elected officials perform the political equivalent of a rain dance: symbolic gestures, performative outrage, and a quiet hope that the wind changes before the next news cycle.
There are known solutions. Controlled burns. Forest thinning. Investment in rapid-response firefighting. Real emissions targets backed by enforceable policy. But those take political courage—and climate change is much easier to spin than to solve. Easier to blame nature, or smoke, or shadowy climate bankers lurking behind Canadian tree lines.
The cycle continues. The air grows thicker. The skies dim. And politicians from both sides of the border continue to stage their climate drama—each act more detached from reality than the last. The forests are burning. But the real fire may be the one consuming a collective willingness to face it.
