On Monday, while President Donald Trump was lashing out at Canada because smoke from nearly 900 wildfires burning there dared to cloud American skies, a very different scene was taking place 1,700 miles away.
In Colorado, firefighters, first responders and community members were participating in a statewide, 300-mile-long funeral procession for Nicholas Dale, a Canadian firefighter who died July 12 battling a wildfire in the southwestern part of the state.
Joy Wobido was among the people who came to pay their respects.
“There are really good people out there, and this guy was from Canada and he came from another country and gave his life to save people,” Wobido told CBS Denver. “These people are out there and they do have families out there who care about them.”
“I wanted to show my support,” she added.
Dale is one of thousands of Canadian firefighters to have traveled south to help fight American fires dating back to the Canada/United States Reciprocal Forest Fire Fighting Arrangement, signed in 1982.
Data shared with JS by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, which coordinates wildland firefighting resources, shows some 3,386 Canadian firefighters have fought American fires since 1988. (And that figure is low, as it doesn’t count Canadian firefighting aircraft and their crews.)
The relationship goes both ways; American firefighters also regularly travel to Canada when the need arises.
In 2000 alone, one of the worst years in American history for wildfires, over 1,300 Canadians firefighters crossed the border. They helped again in 2015 in eastern Washington; in Montana in both 2017 and 2019; in 2020, 594 Canadian firefighters mobilized to the United States; and another 40 helped in Washington in 2021.
Illustration: JS; Photos: Getty
In 2025, when the Palisades fire erupted in Los Angeles, 40 wildland firefighters from Alberta and two support staffers pitched in, as did a crew from British Columbia.
Already on the scene were two CL-415 “Super Scooper” air tankers. Quebec has leased the Canadian-manufactured-and-piloted planes to Los Angeles at the start of firefighting season there every fall since 1993.
(Trump, meanwhile, “contributed” to the emergency by overruling California state officials and ordering the release of more than 2 billion gallons of water that flowed into a dry lakebed hundreds of miles away from the actual fires.)
Dale’s sacrifice, and the contributions of countless other Canadian firefighters who’ve traveled south to help out in years past, has apparently been lost on American lawmakers.
Three days after his death, Reps. Jack Bergman, John James, Lisa McClain, and John Moolenaar ― all Republicans, and all representing Michigan ― sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney accusing the government of being a bad neighbor by failing to address the root causes of increasingly bad fires.
“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,” they wrote.
“Sovereignty comes with responsibility, and the responsibility to prevent a foreseeable disaster from crossing into another country’s airspace has not been met.”
One of the biggest underlying factors in the fires now sweeping Canada is climate change. Because of climate change, fire season has become longer and fires now burn hotter, ignite more easily, spread quicker and are more difficult to extinguish.
It’s also spreading into remote regions of the country “that historically saw less burning,” like the Arctic and sub-Arctic tundra, according to Natural Resources Canada.
The Republicans made no mention of climate change in their letter. Instead, they blamed Canada for not thinning its forests, conducting enough prescribed burns and “inadequately enforcing against arson.”
Canada’s boreal forest is 1.5 billion acres (more than 2 million square miles). To expect anyone to thin it, or engage in “raking and cleaning” it, as Trump has suggested, is farcical.
Perhaps the Americans could pitch in, Ontario Premier Doug Ford told reporters Friday.
“If there’s some politicians out there chirping away, well, maybe what you should do rather than complain is send support, send help, because we have done the exact same thing for our American friends,” Ford said.
“And that’s what you’re supposed to do.”