Canada’s 2026 fire season took its sweet time getting started, but by late June it finally remembered what it was supposed to be doing, returning to near-average activity. By mid-July, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre reported almost 850 active fires across the country, with over 180 of them in Ontario alone.

A NOAA-21 image from July 14 shows smoke billowing from Ontario and drifting southeast, turning skies gray and yellow and the Sun a lovely shade of orange over parts of Quebec and the U.S. Midwest and Northeast. Because nothing says summer like a smoky apocalypse filter.

The smoke’s impact on air quality was a game of altitude roulette: high-altitude smoke was mostly harmless, but ground-level smoke made things unpleasant. In Toronto, air quality hit unhealthy levels, just in time for a heat wave to compound the misery. Thanks, atmosphere.

Much of the smoke came from Northwestern Ontario, where eight fires grew significantly on July 13 and 14, prompting evacuation orders for several communities. Because when the forest wants your house, it takes your house.

As of July 14, fires have burned 1.9 million hectares (4.7 million acres) nationwide - still well below the catastrophic 2023 and 2025 seasons. The rest of the season is anyone’s guess, but a joint U.S.-Canada-Mexico outlook suggests where conditions might get spicy through September.