A U.S. Senator from Ohio has joined with Republican House members in neighboring Michigan in calling out Canada’s alleged forest mismanagement that has led to dozens of wildfires now blanketing the American Midwest and Northeast with toxic smoke.
Instead of the strong letter published this week by other House members, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), a close Donald Trump ally, announced Thursday that he’s introducing a bill to sanction Canada and its officials over the wildfires.
“I’ll be introducing a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity,” Moreno announced on X Thursday.
Smoke from the blazes has not only created hazardous breathing conditions, the smoke is having a serious economic impact.
Michigan is getting hit especially hard during the height of its lucrative tourism season when hundreds of thousands of families from the Detroit area, northern Indiana, and elsewhere head north to enjoy outdoor activities in the Great Lakes State.
Breitbart News obtained a photo of the normally busy I-75 near Gaylord, MI, this week, its lanes typically full of cars heading north for summertime travel, now empty with dense haze reducing visibility.
The normally busy 1-75 in northern Michigan is empty and blanketed in smoke during what is normally the height of the state’s tourism season. Photo by Hamilton Cauffiel.
Senator Moreno also posted a photo of a deserted boulevard in Cleveland, with its buildings surrounded by haze.
“Major cities including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Minneapolis registered dangerous air quality readings on Thursday,” the Hill reported Thursday.
Moreno’s office and four Republican House members from Michigan have criticized officials for failing to contain the wildfires and failing to invest in standard prevention methods such as “forest thinning, fuel reduction, prescribed burns, and beefed up enforcement against arson,” according to this outlet.
The same alleged disregard for forest management, particularly clear-cutting and controlled burns that even Native Americans did centuries ago, was cited by President Trump repeatedly since 2018 for the wildfires in California.
“I’ve been telling them this now for three years, but they don’t want to listen,” Trump said in a 2020 speech in Pennsylvania. “‘The environment, the environment,’ but they have massive fires again.”
In January of 2025, a raging inferno virtually destroyed the entire Pacific Palisades community in Los Angeles, leveling nearly 7,000 buildings, displacing thousands, and killing 12 people. The Los Angeles suburb of Altadena also burned, killing 19 and destroying some 9,000 buildings.
Republican lawmakers threatened sending U.S. agencies into Canada to manage the problem.
Republican House members John James (R-MI), Jack Bergman (R-MI), John Moolenaar (R-MI), and Lisa McClain (R-MI), wrote in an open letter to Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney:
We are done accepting apologies in place of action. If Canada will not manage its forests to prevent these fires, the United States will look elsewhere, and act on our own, to protect our people.
That means our own agencies exploring direct involvement in cross-border fuel reduction and firefighting capacity. It means reconsidering how much benefit of the doubt this relationship continues to earn on an issue where American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year.
Liberal leaders in both California and Canada have typically blamed the fires on climate change, as did Prime Minister Carney this week.
“Asked about the U.S. criticism during a Thursday news conference in London, Ont., Carney brushed it off. He said Canada is pursuing investments in clean energy, while the U.S. is actively working against clean energy,” Yahoo reported.
“Fighting climate change is the responsibility of all countries, including the United States,” Carney said in French.
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. A former Michigan journalist for two decades, he also lost his home in the Pacific Palisades fire. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.