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By Trevor Hunnicutt and Hannah Lang
JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Marylands, July 19 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he told Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that Canada must do better at controlling Ontario wildfires whose smoke has affected several U.S. states.
The day after threatening to levy additional tariffs on Canadian goods to punish Canada over the wildfire smoke, Trump said he spoke to Carney at the FIFA World Cup final that both of them attended on Sunday.
“I have a good relationship with Mark Carney, but we’ve got to stop the fires up there,” Trump told reporters after he returned from the World Cup game in New Jersey.
“Maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs.”
Heavy smoke from hundreds of fires in Ontario enveloped a swath of the United States from the Midwest to the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic starting Thursday, prompting days of warnings to U.S. residents to stay indoors wherever possible.
Carney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s remarks.
In a post on X on Saturday, Carney said Canada has deployed more than 5,300 firefighting personnel, and is leveraging data and advanced thermal imaging to support real-time detection and mitigation efforts.
Roughly 5.9 million acres (2.4 million hectares) have burned during this wildfire season in Canada, according to government data. Climate experts say rising global temperatures are driving an increase in the frequency and intensity of wildfires around the world.
(Reporting by Hannah Lang in New York; Editing by Sergio Non and Michael Perry)
