Go Ad Free

President Donald Trump set off another round of Canadian outrage this week after telling reporters that wildfire smoke drifting south had "poisoned" American air, and that Canada needed to get its forests under control. Ottawa's usual defenders lined up to call it politicization. 

On Monday's Rebel Roundup livestream, Sheila Gunn Reid and David Menzies had a different reaction: he's not wrong.

"He's not necessarily wrong in that proper forestry management does prevent wildfires," Sheila said, pointing to old-growth cut blocks left unmanaged inside provincial and national parks.

Sheila, who lives where the grasslands meet the boreal forest in Alberta, said forests are meant to burn and regenerate on their own, and that the trouble starts when parks are left untouched to avoid offending tourists or environmentalists.

"If you want the natural state of the forest, then you're going to get forest fires," she said. "So you need people to come in and log out cut blocks."

David pushed the irony further. "Isn't it perversely ironic that it is the environmentalists that are to blame for this?" he asked. "They're saying, oh, it's Mother Earth, don't chop down a tree, and then A, you get these wildfires. It's inevitable. And then B, the audacity of blaming this on climate change."

Sheila brought up a 2021 California law discouraging the state from buying Alberta boreal forestry products over Indigenous rights and deforestation concerns.

"We have the world's largest continuous forest, and if we don't log it, it will burn and hurt people, including our American friends," she said. "It was law 416, the Deforestation Free Procurement Act. It passed their Senate 30 to 8, which means there were eight sensible people in the California Senate."

The hosts also played a clip of Premier Doug Ford firing back at Trump directly.

"I got an idea for President Trump," Ford said. "Why don't you get rid of the softwood lumber tariffs, because 33 percent of the lumber that you use in your building, guess what? It comes from Canada. You want us to clear the forest? Well, open up the gates. Let's start shipping softwood lumber down there."

David noted the on-screen banner claimed Ford called the politicization of the fires "disgusting" — right before doing exactly that himself.

Sheila still sided with the substance of Ford's point: "The tariffs disincentivize private sector businesses for managing the forest," she said. "He's not wrong."

Prime Minister Mark Carney didn't escape criticism either. David read from Carney's social media statement, in which he described meeting "federal workers in Ottawa" coordinating the wildfire response and touted "more than 5,000 firefighters and nearly 300 water bombers, helicopters and evacuation aircraft" being mobilized.

Sheila wasn't impressed. "You can tell by the bureaucrats in this photo that climate change is up to no good again," she said. "Like a typical Laurentian elite, he goes to talk to the bureaucrats who are watching radar monitors."

She contrasted it with Premier Danielle Smith's visit to a firefighter staging area in Hinton, Alta., where she herself had also gone.

"You think Carney is going to put himself in any kind of danger?" Sheila asked. "He wouldn't even be in danger. I mean Mark Carney leaving the confines of a building without central air conditioning."