Millions of people across North America have experienced hazardous air pollution this month as nearly a thousand active wildfires continue to rage in Canada. In addition to releasing hazardous chemicals and smoke darkening skies across the continent, the fires in Canada have also disproportionately impacted Indigenous communities, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes. Republican politicians have been loath to acknowledge the role of the climate crisis in making extreme weather events like this more frequent and intense, instead blaming Canadian officials for poor forest management. President Donald Trump has even threatened to impose new tariffs on Canada over the record levels of hazardous air.
Independent Canadian journalist Rachel Gilmore says that while Trump’s comments are “extremely offensive” to people in the country, Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney’s policies — while acknowledging the science — also do little to mitigate the climate crisis as he approves new oil pipelines that would operate for decades.
“He’s not exactly taking the climate action that we need here in Canada,” Gilmore says of Carney.
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
Millions across North America face another day of hazardous air pollution as nearly a thousand active wildfires continue to rage in Canada. Hazardous air quality alerts are once again in effect today for major cities including Chicago, Detroit, Columbus and Minneapolis. Here in New York, air quality has improved — at least for now — following what officials are calling the second-worst smoke event in New York City modern history. In Canada, the fires have disproportionately impacted Indigenous communities, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes.
On Friday, President Trump threatened to impose new tariffs on Canada over the record levels of hazardous air. Trump wrote, quote, “The United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable,” Trump said. But Trump has not said a word about climate change, which many scientists say is a driving force behind the fires.
We go now to Montreal, where we’re joined by Rachel Gilmore, independent journalist, creator of Bubble Pop Media.
Thanks so much for being with us, Rachel. If you can talk about what’s happening in Canada, the blowback, I guess you could say, in the United States, and President Trump threatening Carney and Canada with tariffs, blaming Carney for what’s happening in Canada, actually standing next to Carney and the Mexican president at the World Cup on Sunday in New Jersey?
RACHEL GILMORE: Yeah, the situation in Canada is — it’s horrifying. I mean, we’re watching the impact of the climate crisis in real time. It’s disproportionately impacting, as you noted, Indigenous communities here. People have had to flee their homes, a large number of them ending up in Thunder Bay, where there’s actually not enough space for everyone. The people are camping in tents just so that they have somewhere safe to sleep, that isn’t their communities that they’ve had to leave behind because of the ravaging wildfires. As you noted, there’s almost a thousand of them burning. It’s genuinely a crisis. There’s lots of mobilization happening here in Canada.
And the commentary from Trump was extremely offensive to a lot of Canadians. I mean, what else is new? I think, unfortunately, no one’s really surprised by it anymore up here. But, you know, particularly given just days before he made those comments, a Canadian firefighter had died in Colorado fighting wildfires, so it was just extremely, extremely tone-deaf.
But the additional horror, I guess, of just the apathy in Trump’s comments is the reality that he’s not acknowledging climate change. And Mark Carney sort of did a little bit of — he doesn’t usually respond directly to the more unhinged stuff that Trump says, but he sort of made this comment about how it is the climate crisis that is making the dry and hot conditions for more wildfires to be sparked when there’s more extreme weather, which causes more lightning strikes. But the difficulty here is that, you know, as much as Carney’s saying that in response to Trump, he’s not exactly taking the climate action that we need here in Canada — in fact, quite the opposite — despite him sort of selling himself as this climate guy leaning on his credentials from his time at the United Nations.
AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about that? I mean, on the one hand, you have President — you have Prime Minister Carney announcing a multibillion-dollar strategy on what he called breaking Canada’s economic dependence on the U.S., which must have infuriated President Trump. But it includes a new pipeline in Alberta and building up multiple liquefied natural gas terminals. The proposed pipeline would move 1 million barrels of oil daily from landlocked Alberta to the southern coast of British Columbia, near Vancouver. If you can talk more about the significance of this, Rachel?
RACHEL GILMORE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of us were shocked by the announcement, because so many people had this idea that Carney would at least give the tiniest bit of a damn about the climate crisis. And yeah, he came out and made this announcement alongside Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Alberta is where most of the oil is in Canada. It’s where we have our oil sands. And, you know, they announced this new proposed pipeline.
And what’s ridiculous about it is the claim is that we need this investment in oil and gas to diversify away from the United States, but the economic case even isn’t there. We just twinned a TMX pipeline to the West Coast, and just now it’s starting to make about a billion dollars annually. And we paid, the Canadian taxpayers, $34 billion for that pipeline, which means it will have to make that kind of profit for 34 more years to be profitable. And that’s the previous pipeline that the Canadian people were forced to buy by a Liberal government. And now Mark Carney is saying that he’s, you know, offering his full-throated support for another oil pipeline? I mean, the only way that we can actually profit from that oil pipeline is if we absolutely abandon the fight against climate change, because we would need there to be a world where demand for oil and gas continues to uptick for decades into the future to actually make money off of this pipeline. So, it makes no economic sense.
And obviously, it is a horrific plan for the climate crisis. In Canada, our oil and gas sector is our largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. And Mark Carney is selling this snake oil solution of carbon capture and storage to go alongside the oil and gas pipeline. But he’s offering a tax credit for oil companies that use that captured carbon to actually inject it into depleted oil wells, fracking out more oil that otherwise would not be able to be accessed by those companies. So they get a tax credit for that.
AMY GOODMAN: Rachel Gilmore, we thank you so much for being with us, independent journalist in Canada, creator of Bubble Pop Media. I’ll be in Martha’s Vineyard July 31st for the screening of Steal This Story, Please! I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
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