Where There's Smoke, There's Fire, and When There's Fire, There's Definitely Smoke.
There is a particular strain of American politics that can look at its neighbour, which happens to be on fire, breathe in a lungful of smoke, and conclude that the appropriate response is: That's it, your smoke is bothering me; we'll impose more sanctions!
This is a country whose principal offence is being on fire and standing upwind.
Canada, a nation beloved around the world for its kindness and generosity, has, according to America's president and a number of US Senators, failed to extinguish every tree currently burning and allowed smoke to drift across the border.
Apparently, this is an atrocity, a word used by an actual United States senator in an actual press release about actual smoke, which, and I cannot stress this enough, is not new. Smoke has been produced since the invention of fire. To my knowledge, it has never once used a passport to make its way to wherever smoke goes. As far as America is concerned, smoke is now classified as an illegal immigrant.
Where is ICE when you need them?
But my favourite part of this saga is that a sitting member of the U.S. Senate has drafted legislation so aggressive that it defies logic. What this bill proposes is that the President of the United States be given 30 days to determine, with the gravity of a war powers resolution, whether "smoke" did a "bad thing" and, if so, to revoke visas of the Canadian officials responsible for the weather.
Senator Moreno (yup, that's him) is only the warm-up act. The headliner in all of this, of course, inevitably, is the President himself, who this week discovered a genuinely novel use for yet another tariff.
His logic, delivered in the all-capitals fury on his Truth Social platform, typed with one finger and both thumbs, read:
Canada is on fire; the fire has made a smell; the smell has cost America money; and therefore the smell should be billed to Canada as an additional line item on the tariffs it is already paying.
He went on to call it "Willful Negligence", in capitals naturally, as if negligence were a title he was bestowing on a sycophant rather than an accusation, and vowed to phone the Canadian Prime Minister personally, to find out what they are going to do about it.
What makes this genuinely absurd is that, in the same week the President was calculating how much he could squeeze from Canada for poor forest management, his own administration was quietly dismantling the American government laboratories that study and advise on wildfire smoke and its effects on human health. Defund the people studying the smoke, then bill the neighbours for producing it. It's the policy equivalent of firing your smoke detector and then suing the toaster.
That's not a punchline. That's the actual sequence of events.
All this arrived with impeccable timing, as the smoke has now thickened over New York, just in time for the World Cup final. The leader of the free world will have much to explain to several billion football fans about why the air above the trophy presentation tastes faintly of Saskatchewan.
I like Canadians, and with good reason; my daughter is in the process of becoming one. As a people, they are constitutionally allergic to confrontation; they are ever so kind and are the sort of nation that apologises to furniture.
Not so the Premier of Manitoba, a province that has spent the summer evacuating entire towns while residents watched their homes burn. He called the visiting congressional delegation "ambulance chasers" and referred to the American lawmakers as vultures. It's a man setting down his fire hose long enough to throw a punch, then picking it right back up.
While this was happening, the Canadian Prime Minister stood at a podium in Ontario and, in French (to make sure what he was about to say required Trump to read the subtitles), observed that fighting climate change is everybody's job, including America's. Which is diplomatic code for: thanks for the tariff invoice, shame about your emissions record. It is the single most polite way anyone has ever told a head of state to go f*** himself.
Meanwhile, here in Bali, I feel qualified to weigh in on smoke, as I had to stop Wyan from burning garden waste with the enthusiasm of a man who has never once consulted a wind forecast. This, I submit, is the difference between a rational adult and a United States President with a news cycle to feed.
Because that's really what this is.
Nobody sanctions the weather. You can't put a travel ban on a cold front. What you can do, if you're a senator in a swing state, is find a villain who can't vote against you and hold a press conference in a smoke haze you can blame on someone else's fire. It's not policy. It's theatre with a smoke machine, and for once, real smoke did the special effects department's job for them.
Where there's smoke, there's fire. And where there's fire near an American election cycle, there is, without fail, a man with a tariff schedule, trying to work out who to bill for the wind.
Paul v Walters is the author of several novels and an anthology of short stories, and is fortunate enough to live on the island of Bali. His latest work, RITUAL, was recently launched at the Ubud International Readers and Writers Festival.
