Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) announced Thursday that he will introduce legislation to impose sanctions on Canada and Canadian government officials over massive wildfires that have blanketed American cities in hazardous smoke for a third straight year.
“I’ll be introducing a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity,” Moreno posted on X Thursday, alongside an image of a Cleveland boulevard swallowed in haze.
Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Minneapolis all registered dangerous air quality readings on Thursday. Smoke and haze stretched as far as New York City, obscuring the Manhattan skyline and tinting skies orange.
Moreno’s office said Canadian officials failed to invest in basic wildfire prevention methods including forest thinning, fuel reduction, prescribed burns and arson enforcement. The Ohio Republican argued those failures have inflicted real health costs on American families.
Four Republican House members sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Thursday, calling out his government for a third consecutive year of inaction.
“This is the third consecutive year we have had to write to Canadian officials about a crisis that Canada has the tools to prevent and has chosen not to,” wrote Reps. John James (R-MI), Jack Bergman (R-MI), John Moolenaar (R-MI) and Lisa McClain (R-MI).
The lawmakers said the United States may send its own agencies across the border to address the problem if Canada fails to act. “We are done accepting apologies in place of action,” they wrote. “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.”
The letter warned that further inaction could prompt the U.S. to reconsider “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.”
Moreno, a close ally of President Trump, said he expects to introduce the sanctions bill when the Senate returns next week.
